Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review

Editors Damien W. Riggs & Vicki Crowley

The Australian Psychological Society Ltd.

ISSN 1833-4512

Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review

Editor

Damien W. Riggs, The University of Adelaide

Editorial Board

Graeme Kane, Eastern Drug and Alcohol Service Gordon A. Walker, Monash University Jim Malcom, The University of Western Sydney Robert Morris, Private practice Liz Short, Victoria University Brett Toelle, The University of Sydney Jane Edwards, Spencer Gulf Rural Health School Warrick Arblaster, Mental Health Policy Unit, ACT Murray Drummond, The University of South Australia

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The Review is a peer-reviewed publication that is available online through the Australian Psychological Society website. Its remit is to encourage research that challenges the stereotypes and assumptions of pathology that have often inhered to research on lesbians and gay men (amongst others). The aim of the Review is thus to facilitate discussion over the direction of lesbian and gay psychology in Australia, and to provide a forum within which academics, practitioners and lay people may publish.

The Review is open to a broad range of material, and especially welcomes research, commentary and reviews that critically evaluate the status quo in regards to lesbian and gay issues. The Review also seeks papers that redress the imbalance that has thus far focused on the issues facing white lesbians and gay men, to the exclusion of other sexual and racial groups.

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Work published within the Review does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Australian Psychological Society. Whilst the APS supports the work of the Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Interest Group, it also adheres to its own standards for practice and research that may at times conflict with those of the Review.

Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review

Volume 3 Number 3

Contents

Editorial : Queer cultural producers 147 Damien W. Riggs and Vicki Crowley

Articles

Creative queer Singapore: The illiberal pragmatics of cultural production 149 Audrey Yue

‘Gay marriage’, lesbian wedding 161 Barbara Baird

Recognition factors 171 Rosslyn Prosser

The hegemonic aesthetic 175 Shaun M. Filiault & Murray J.N. Drummond

Psychology, liberalism, and activism: Challenging discourses of ‘equality with’ in 185 the same-sex marriage debate Damien W. Riggs

Commentary

Comment on Duffy (2007) 195 Sophie Pointer

Book Reviews

Challenging lesbian norms: Intersex, transgender, intersectional and queer perspectives 196 Sue Kentlyn

Calls for Papers

GLIP Review: Mental health and LGBT people

Health Sociology Review: Community, family, citizenship and the health of LGBTIQ people

Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2007

EDITORIAL: QUEER CULTURAL PRODUCERS

DAMIEN W. RIGGS & VICKI CROWLEY

This issue of the Review takes as its communities as well as the broader starting place a forum that was convened Australian and international community. as part of the 2006 Adelaide Feast Covering issues from ‘same-sex marriage’ Festival, a yearly cultural programme to representations of gay men in comics, featuring local and international LGBTIQ from creative industries and queer cultures events. The forum marked a second in Singapore to narratives of lesbian collaboration between the Cultures of the embodiment, the authors contribute to an Body Research Group from the University understanding of the complex ways in of South Australia and was convened by which cultural production takes place, and the outgoing Feast director Fanny the multiple ways in which cultures Jacobson. It provided an important venue themselves can be read. for LGBTIQ issues from within both the academy and community to come together In the first paper Audrey Yue, the keynote in one place. Speakers presented speaker at the forum, examines how the theoretical analyses, shared personal development of creative industries within narratives, screened performance pieces, Singapore represents an ‘illiberal read poetry and presented artworks for pragmatics’, whereby queer people are display. What came out of the event was a included in some respects and excluded in sense that theory, art and activism are others. Questioning the hegemony of the often intimately interwoven in the lives of ‘post-Stonewall’ logic of queer liberation, LGBTIQ people, and that paying attention Yue asserts the specificities of queer to just one aspect could result in a failure cultural production in Singapore, and its to understand the breadth and diversity role in the queering of Singapore itself. that exists within LGBTIQ communities. Barbara Baird takes up the issue of post- The forum took as its starting place the Stonewall politics in her insightful paper on notion of ‘queer cultural producers’, and ‘gay marriage’. Baird places this term the presenters examined, in varying ways, under question in order to examine how the ways in which queer cultures are calls for ‘same-sex marriage rights’ may be produced, how queer cultures destabilise understood as an aspect of the or challenge mainstream cultures, and normalisation of queer rights that have importantly, how queer cultures destabilise persisted in varying forms in the Western themselves – how the diversity within world since Stonewall. Baird challenges us LGBTIQ communities presents a radical to consider how the ‘sex’ in ‘same-sex’ challenge to notions of coalitionism. disappears when marriage becomes all Nonetheless, the overall message from the about the ‘respectable same-sex couple’. forum was that links and supportive Baird’s paper is a salient reminder of the frameworks can be developed through a complexities of debates over queer rights shared commitment to examining and and their location within broader political challenging cultural production, in its and personal economies whereby the ‘pink normative and queer forms. dollar’ plays a significant role in the production of particular (dominant) queer The papers presented in this issue of the cultures. Review demonstrate the breadth of the forum and its attention to cultural In her ficto-critical work, Ros Prosser production across a range of spaces, both provides a narrative of lesbian bodies that public and intimate. All of the authors call threads together the memories of bodies into question the ways in which cultural past with the experiences of bodies norms function to produce particular present. Prosser questions what it means bodies, and importantly the authors turn to be a lesbian, and moreover a lesbian this critical gaze upon LGBTIQ inhabiting a particular space and time

RIGGS & CROWLEY: EDITORIAL

wherein certain bodies claim space over on issues of cultural production within others, both within lesbian communities lesbian communities. and with-out. Prosser speaks of lesbian cultural production, of resistance, of Together these papers are a reminder of conformity, and most frequently of the exciting and stimulating environment uncertainty. Prosser’s work reminds us that can result from collaborations that the ‘lesbian archive’ is far more between arts and cultural festivals and the complex than it may often seem. academy. Fanny Jacobson’s commitment to challenging norms within queer Shaun Filiault and Murray Drummond communities and to foregrounding the usefully extend previous work on the frisson of ideas, intellectual and other concept of hegemonic masculinity to creative production often put aspects of examine its constitutive parts, and in Feast at odds with those who sought a particular they highlight the importance of more ‘acceptable face’ for LGBTIQ examining the aspects of aesthetic that communities. The 2006 collaboration is shape gay men’s experiences of testament to a diverse range of cultural embodiment. By focusing on two markedly productions and continues to place Fanny different forms of gay male embodiment, at the forefront of innovation and as such they emphasise how hegemonies shift and in a unique position within LGBTIQ cultural are reworked across gay and straight spaces across Australia and abroad. cultures. Importantly it points academia towards community collaborations in which the Returning to the issue of same-sex boundaries of thinking can explore and marriage, Damien Riggs explores how the express its leading creative edge. discipline of psychology engages with activism in regards to queer rights, and These papers as a whole highlight the how this results in the cultural production richness of queer cultural production both of particular forms of rights deemed within Australia and internationally, and intelligible within a liberal framework. signal some of the sites where Riggs asks us to consider alternate ways reclaimations, revisionings and reifications of conceptualising the role of the state, take place. ‘Queer’ cultural production is and the implications of particular forms of never outside of cultural norms by the sanction for a broad range of queer very fact of its queerness. What makes a people. Rather than seeking ‘equality with’ queer cultural event queer is its the heterosexual majority, Riggs suggests commitment to recognising the norms that queer communities may instead through which it is produced, the question how sanction is accorded and at privileges it may grant, and the whose expense this comes. opportunities for challenging these. Queer cultural production never is (or should be) Finally, the issue includes one commentary a complete event, with ongoing challenges – a response to the paper on same-sex to various hegemonies central not only to adoption and parenting in the last issue of the works within this issue, but also to the the Review – and a book review, focusing broader practices of queer cultural production across LGBTIQ communities.

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Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2007

CREATIVE QUEER SINGAPORE: THE ILLIBERAL PRAGMATICS OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION

AUDREY YUE

Abstract first time an NAC award was given to a popular cultural artist. Muted in this controversy, This paper examines how the cultural however, is the rumour of Lee’s gay sexuality. liberalisation of the creative industries in Like the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, Lee’s Singapore has enabled the emergence of a local speculative homosexuality, rife on the Internet, queer culture characterised by the logic of is public knowledge to those in the know, illiberal pragmatics. It first introduces the among the inner echelons of cultural and concept of illiberal pragmatics and evaluates this government elites, as well as in the gay logic in current discourses of homosexuality in subcultures (see for example, the jendyshop, the country. It further illustrates the 2006). That a country would simultaneously characteristics of illiberal pragmatics in the continue to maintain its anachronistic British creative industries of gay popular fiction, gay Penal Code prosecuting homosexuals, and theatre and lesbian nightlife. It argues that recognise a gay pop icon at the same time, illiberal pragmatics, rather than the post- speaks volume about the changing cultural value Stonewall rights-based discourse of liberation, is accorded the arts in the current new era of the the foundation for the emergence of queer cultural economy and economic creativity. Singapore. It extends pragmatism to show how it is a material force for local queer individuality Two years earlier, 15 (2003), a short film by and social action. These are evident in the emerging gay filmmaker Roystan Tan, was disjunctive figures of the sister transsexual, the banned for its portrayal of homoerotic tension Asian Mardi Gras gay boy and the tomboy butch. between two fifteen year-old school boys despite winning the Grand Fiction Award at the Introduction Tampere Film Festival. Tan circumvented the censorship and posted it online for free In 2005, the National Arts Council (NAC) of downloading. That year, more than ten Singapore conferred the country’s most thousand local gays and lesbians, as well as prestigious Cultural Medallion Music Award to regional homo tourists, crowded the city-state pop singer, composer and playwright Dick Lee in for the annual gay and lesbian Nation Party. The recognition of his three-decade long contribution Nation Party began three years earlier as a to the arts, theatre and music. Lee’s repertoire protest party, and by 2003 had become so includes multi-lingual albums and musical plays successful that Singapore was dubbed by that parody regional folk songs with disco, hip Agence France-Presse as ‘Asia’s new gay hop and political mockery (Wee, 1996). His entertainment capital’. In the meanwhile, the stage performances are noted for their entrepreneurial efforts of locally-owned flamboyant costumes, vernacular dialects and Fridae.com had paid off and it has now become cross-dressing characters. He was most the main Internet portal to gay and lesbian Asia, acclaimed for his 1989 The Mad Chinaman with more than two hundred thousand musical play as the lead protagonist with a members, out of which about one hundred and heavily painted Beijing Opera face, not dissimilar twenty thousand are estimated to be from the to Chen Dieyi in the female role of dan played GLBTIQ community in the country. In an island by the late gay icon Leslie Cheung, in Farewell size of six hundred and eighty-two square My Concubine (1993), or gay Asian Australian kilometres, and a population of four million, filmmaker Tony Ayers’s own masquerade in his Singapore currently has nineteen bars and semi-autobiographical documentary China Dolls sixteen saunas catering to its ephemeral and (1997). In 1996, Lee won Taiwan’s Golden subterranean yet visible GLBTIQ community. Horse Award for the theme song to the Hong Operating on a daily basis, these have flourished Kong gay and lesbian film classic He’s a Woman, as a result of rent subsidies in the creative She’s a Man , also starring the late Cheung. Lee’s riverside precinct of Chinatown. conferral raised controversy among the arts elite and the mainstream audience as this was the

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These irrational developments, between cultural centralised rational public administration as the liberalisation and sexual surveillance, fundamental basis for industralisation within a characterise what I critically describe as the capitalist system, financed largely by illiberal logic underpinning the emergence of multinational capital” (1995, p. 59). This creative queer culture in Singapore. While conceptual structure is evident not only in homosexuality is still a criminal offence and gay making domestic conditions favourable to Internet content subject to state censorship, gay foreign investments, but in all aspects of social artists and entrepreneurs, especially those life including the promotion of education as setting up businesses to help cultivate a twenty- human capital, meritocracy, population policy, four seven night-time economy, are encouraged. language and multiracialism. Pragmatism Even gay filmmakers whose films are banned rationalises policy implementations as ‘natural’, have also benefited from the nation-wide roll out ‘necessary’ and ‘realistic’. As an ideology, it has of digital infrastructure supported by the state. enabled popular legitimacy: “in everyday This paper critically examines these language, [pragmatism] translates simply into discrepancies by evaluating the illiberal ‘being practical’ in the sense of earning a living” pragmatics of governance. I first introduce the (1997, p. 131). Following Edgar Schein’s concept of illiberal pragmatics and evaluate this development of “strategic pragmatism” in logic in current theorisations of homosexuality in Singapore’s cultural institutions (1997), political the country. I further illustrate the economist Linda Low (2001) also points to how characteristics of illiberal pragmatics by pragmatism is the “singular prerequisite” to the providing a critical mapping of queer cultural “political will to implement the necessary productions in the new creative industries. I use changes…for continuous self-renewal to manage queer in this paper with two intentions: first, as change and continuity” (p. 437). The marked an umbrella category for GLTBIQs; and second, improvement in the material life of the as a critical interrogation of colonial and population and the economic ascendency of the postcolonial heteronormativity. I argue illiberal country as a developing nation to a global post- pragmatics, rather than the post-Stonewall industrial metropolis in the last forty years has rights-based discourse of liberation, is the made it difficult to argue against the success of foundation for the emergence of queer pragmatism. Singapore. I extend pragmatism to show how it is a material force for local queer individuality What is unique about Singapore’s pragmatism is and social action. that governmental interventions are “contextual and instrumental” rather than “in principle” – Theorising Queer Singapore: Illiberal that is, they are “discrete and discontinuous Pragmatics acts, in the sense that a particular intervention in a particular region of social life may radically Theorisations of GLBTIQ cultures in Singapore alter the trajectory that an early intervention focus on human rights, social movement and may have put in place” (Chua, 1995, p. 69), so spatial politics. Common to these studies is how that a rational intervention in one special area of the encounter with the state has produced social life may turn out to be quite irrational different imaginations of homosexuality and when the totality of social life is taken into sexual identity. Although these theorisations question. These contradictions, evident and engage the governance of the civil society, they well-documented in the policy and everyday do not consider how Singapore is also governed domains of marriage, reproduction, language by the logic of illiberal pragmatics. This section and education, highlight the ambivalence of examines the concept of illiberal pragmatics, and pragmatism. Chua locates such ambivalence in demonstrates its logic in current discourses of his formulation of a non-liberal democracy to homosexuality in the country. describe a state where “the formal features of democratic electoral politics remain in place and Singapore sociologist Beng-Huat Chua has intact” but is “thoroughly sceptical regarding the written extensively on the ideology of rationality of the ordinary citizen and pragmatism as the conceptual structure of unapologetically anti-liberal” (p. 185). Actions postcolonial governance in Singapore. He shows are rationalised as “pre-emptive interventions how pragmatism was conceived from the late which ‘ensure’ the collective well-being, as 1960s to 1980s as “an ideology that embodies a measures of good government rather than vigorous economic development orientation that abuses of individuals’ rights” (p. 187). Central to emphasises science and technology and pragmatism is thus the logic of illiberalism where 150

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interventions and implementations are couples were also recently permitted to co- potentially always neo-liberal and non-liberal, purchase the cheaper, government-subsidised rational and irrational. This ambivalence is, as I public housing. Again, rather than legitimating argue, the foundation for the emergence of a the interdependency of same-sex relationships, creative queer Singapore, not one based on the same-sex co-homeownership is another rational Western post-Stonewall emancipation discourse instrument to alleviate the over-supply of public of rights, but through the illiberal pragmatics of housing. Although same-sex relationships are survival. In the following, I demonstrate how not legally recognised, same-sex couples are this logic is evident in current discourses of also able to make claims to the everyday homosexuality. I examine these discourses at intimacies of living together, domesticity and some length because they present an account of home ownership. These two developments show the cultural and legal histories, practices and the anachronism of the laws that regulate events that have shaped the current contexts of homosexuality and the irrational logic by which oppositional queer activism, and gay and lesbian homosexuality is governed. lifestyle consumption. My aim here is to critically contextualise this milieu and show how these Russell Heng (2001) examines the emergence of theorisations point to, yet fail to acknowledge, a gay political movement from his experiences the illiberal pragmatics of governance. as an activist. He traces the beginnings of a gay scene in the 1950s with the ‘ ah qua’ , a local The (Il)Legality of Contemporary nativist transsexual who used to ply the sex Homosexuality trade in Bugis Street, an area in Chinatown that was an icon of the exotic Far East. In the 1970s Laurence Leong (1997) provides a sustained the figure of the Westernised and English- study on the British colonial legacy that prohibits language speaking ‘Orchard Road queen’ homosexuality in Singapore. He examines emerged when gay-friendly bars and discos criminal law to show how sodomitical acts are opened in downtown Orchard Road and were charged under the Section 377 (Unnatural frequented by Caucasian tourists. Heng Offences) and Section 377A (Outrages on categorises these figures as belonging to an Decency) of the Penal Code. Singapore, he emergent gay “scene” (p. 83). He shows how argues, lacks human rights and “appears to be the gay community came about in the 1980s the last frontier in the Asian region for positive with economic affluence and societal gay and lesbian developments” (p. 142). liberalisation, and maps the rise of cruising Replicating the teleology of European against the increasing surveillance, entrapment Enlightenment, Leong’s framework is insufficient and prosecution of homosexuality. In the late to account for the gender variance of 1980s, the globalisation of AIDS, which led to transsexuality and the intimacy of same-sex co- the development of the non-governmental habitation that are legalised and subsidised in organisation Action for AIDS provided a platform the country. Since 1974, the country has led the for gay activists to organise and mobilise. He region in gender reassignment surgery and provides a sustained examination of the 1990s conducted more than five hundred operations in activism of a local gay group People Like Us government-funded hospitals. Transgenders can (PLU) and traces their unsuccessful efforts to legally change their gender identity, and in gain official group registration and attain political 1996, were permitted to legally marry. The logic legitimacy. Heng warns of “coming out of the of illiberal pragmatics shows how the closet” in a country where “the relationship institutionalisation of transgenderism does not between homosexuals and the state will reflect the recognition of a tradition of continue to have its share of suspicion and indigenous transsexualism or the progressive uncertainty” (p. 95). His self-reflexive account claims of sexual minorities, but the governance follows the progressive logic of Western gay of gender transgression as a disease that can be liberation that traces the movement from scene medically corrected and socially to community towards an end-point of heteronormalised. Although Leong highlights decriminalisation and recognition. By describing these developments, he does not consider how the two earlier figures as belonging to just “a they paradoxically allow for the opening up of an gay scene which served their entertainment alternative expression of gender variance in a needs” and comparing them with “a (later) country that does not recognise homosexuality. community with an identified purpose of This anomaly in the governance of sexuality is improving the status and welfare of gay people”, also evident in property law where same-sex he enforces his own hierarchical moral 151

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judgements on the two different practices that prime minister’s published comments endorsing are equally as sustaining to the vibrancy of gay the employment of openly gay civil servants, he lives (p. 90). His trajectory follows the rights- shows how the gay community has been based discourse cautioned by Michael Warner imagined through the views of the conservative (1999) and Steven Seidman (2005) as majority that support the ideologies of family normalising and assimilationist. By focusing on values, heterosexual social cohesion and neo- the fight for equal rights based on reforming the liberal economic growth: “Through complex and stigma of minority discrimination, Heng’s dynamic ideological negotiations that take place account has inadvertently delegitimised the within the broader and inherently contradictory indigeneity of local gay sexuality; trend of political and economic liberalization, heteronormativity, and the effects of colonial homosexuals are ‘tentatively’ interpellated as and developmental capitalism on homosexuality, gay Singapore subjects who are part of a remain unchallenged. Although he acknowledges community that is rejected by an imaginary the territorialisation of homosexuality in the mainstream and yet grudgingly relied upon by a social and cultural spheres, he fails to locate state anxious to appear sufficiently open-minded these practices within the illiberal pragmatics of in order to attract global capital and talent” (p. governance. 184). He further examines the reactions to these events by the gay community on online forums These irrational logics are evident in how the and shows how a “siege mentality greatly helps subterranean geography of homosexuality is in the processes of imagining this community produced in heternormative spaces in Singapore. into being” (p. 188). He criticises gay activists, Kean Fan Lim (2004) examines the construction in their strife for equal rights, for portraying gay of homosexual practices through interventions in Singaporeans as civic minded and nationally public debates, Internet publishing and public patriotic, and colluding with the neo-liberal dance parties. Using interviews with gay activists discourse of economic creativity. He argues gay and gay entrepreneurs, and juxtaposing these identities are formed not through the ideologies against print media debates on homosexuality, of social structures but “imaginatively he argues: “the overt spatial expressions of formulated with strategic purpose within homosexuality may be occurring, but that does evolving discursive contexts” (p. 197). Tan’s not necessarily mean that homosexuals are account clearly highlights the contradictions accepted as part of ‘mainstream’ society…, they between the continued policing of homosexuality are merely tolerated ” (p. 1778, emphasis in on the one hand, and economically-driven social original.). Although he points to creative liberalisation on the other. These discourses strategies of resistance, it is unclear what these discussed above provide a contemporary strategies are and how exactly spatial tactics of backdrop to the (il)legality of homosexuality by resistances are enacted. What is clear in his inscribing an indigenous tradition of same-sex analysis however, is the illiberal logic that eroticism, accounting for the emergence of a underlies the production of subcultural rights-based social movement, and gesturing homosexual spaces. While gay activists are not towards a neo-liberal agenda of economic allowed to officially register gay and lesbian reform and queer inclusion. Although they do organisations, and gay Internet content is not focus on the central role illiberal pragmatism subjected to censorship, GLBTIQs can freely plays in these transformations, these accounts publish and access a global audience online, and highlight the country’s irrational and ambivalent organise carnivalesque public parties in real life. modes of governance. In the following, I These contradictions between law and lore show introduce the critical role of creative industries in how emergent GLBTIQ expression is shaped by augmenting the logic of illiberal pragmatism. the neo-liberal push towards entrepreneurship Using gay literature, gay theatre and lesbian and digital literacy on the one hand, and non- nightlife, I show how illiberal pragmatism is liberal media surveillance and social control on characterised by a disjunctive mode of the other. displacement that has enabled the flourishing of local queer cultural production. Such illiberalisms are further explored by Kenneth Paul Tan (2006) in his study of how the Creative Queer Cultural Productions ‘gay community’ has been imagined. Using two events – the first, in 2000, regarding the In the wake of the financial crisis in 1997, church’s claim that “homosexuals can change”, countries in Asia have sought to remake their and the second, in 2003, regarding a former industries through economic reforms that would

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ensure the transition of their predominantly progress and liberation; similarly, the discourse traditional manufacturing economies to of ‘sustainability’ is also problematic if it is simply technologically-enhanced knowledge-based a nativist reaction to protect local cultures from creative economies. Creative industries sell the global erosion. Catching up, as a process of business of the arts and culture by transforming belatedly speeding up, is also a process of what arts and culture into services and commodities Derrida has called tele-technic dislocation (cited that add value to the economy. In 2002 in Bhabha, 1999, p. ix). Catching up is thus a Singapore published its policy blueprint, Creative process that at once provides access to and Industries Development Strategy , for the new disrupts the essential temporality of the West. It economy that detailed reforms in the clusters of unsettles the ontology of the native and its arts and culture, media and design (Media organic being-and-belonging of the nation. It Development Authority, 2002). This followed entails “the move from organic temporality to Japan’s Copyright White Paper developed to disjunctive, displaced acceleration ” (Bhabha, strengthen its intellectual property infrastructure 1999, p. x, emphasis in original). This mode of (Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, disjunctive, displaced acceleration is evident in Posts and Telecommunications, 2001). Since the queer productions of the recent creative and then, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Korea have cultural industries. In the following, I use the also implemented policies to pursue their industries of literature, theatre and creative industries of copyright, cinema and entertainment to focus on the figures of the information technology. These reforms are transsexual, the gay man and the butch as characterised by their sectoral approach of exemplary tropes for demonstrating this mode cultural mapping (Global Alliance for Cultural of displaced acceleration. Diversity 2006, p. 6). Framed by the ‘catch-up’ thesis, this approach follows sectors identified in Disjunctive Acceleration: The Sister Western economies, uses universal statistics Transsexual and the Glocal Gay from global reports such as world and competitiveness yearbooks, and models Popular fiction has been one of the earliest industries after influential studies by Richard cultural industries to examine homosexuality. Florida (2002) and John Howkins (2002). The More than ten novels have been locally normative use of these universal frameworks published since the 1990s that examine the and empirical data, argue Chris Gibson and Lily various themes of transsexuality, coming out, Kong, “make[s] generalizations about the and living with HIV/AIDS. In 1990, Joash Moo cultural economy…where meaning[s]…coalesce published Sisterhood: The Untold Story based on around singular, definitive interpretations” his interviews with local transsexuals and (2005, p. 549). In 2005, UNESCO introduced the transvestites. ‘The sisterhood’ is a collective second approach of ‘cultural indigenisation’ to term for local transgenders who call themselves frame the development of Asian creative ‘sisters’. In the preface, Moo explains: “They industries by emphasising how local are defined as ‘transsexuals’ or ‘transvestites’. communities are created through the new Transsexuals undergo surgery to change their networks of cultural industries that focus on gender. Transvestites dress up superficially to participation and community-based look like members of the opposite sex. They are development: “The industries in general are not just ‘gays’. Physically, they are men and smaller and mobilize communities at a level that women; psychologically they are not ” (p. vii, is closer to the grassroots than more traditional emphases in original.). The book traces the industry development” (UNESCO, 2005, p. 1). experiences of thirteen transgenders through The ‘cultural indigenisation’ thesis incorporates the characters of lascivious prostitutes, culture into national development plans for the effeminate soldiers and dandy undergraduate purpose of achieving “sustainable development” students. It details their ordeals of adolescent (p. 1). same-sex attraction, the shock of their sexual desire, the trauma of sex-change operations and While these two approaches support the the joys of marriage. The sequel, Sisterhood: economic rationale behind cultural liberalisation New Moons in San Francisco (1993), is book- and queer inclusion, they are inadequate to ended with an endorsement by Professor S.S. account for the local specificities of creative Ratnam, the surgeon and gynaecologist who queer cultural productions. The discourse of performed the first sex-change operation in ‘catch up’ is problematic if it simply rehearses Singapore, and an acclaim by the local the post-Stonewall Enlightenment logic of entertainment magazine guide, 8 Days , claiming 153

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the book as the “First in local literary history to masculinity. In Peculiar Chris , the gay characters deal with the social phenomenon” (n.p.). These exploit the physical rigour and surveillance of collections, published by Times Book the army into “a means of queer networking”: International, a subsidiary of the conglomerate “In aesthetic terms, the physical rigors of NS Fraser and Neave (and partially owned by the produced masculine bodies in sync with global Singapore government’s Temasek Holdings gay fashions” (p. 123). He further examines how company), present personal portraits and the central protagonist, Chris, comes to terms inscribe an indigenous tradition of transsexuality with his sexual identity by comparing his that has only begun to be ‘made present’ as a different sexual encounters at underground result of the legality of gender reassignment beats, and with middle-class and straight-acting surgery and the official support given to local lovers, and shows how Chris’s choice of the writers to publish local stories. Here, the latter points to an imagined gay ideal that is instrumental rationality of heteronormative similar to the dominant ideology of the nation. incorporation that has endorsed and facilitated The worlds of gay domestic bliss, economic the medicalisation of gender reassignment has privilege, monogamy and family ties, compared been disrupted by the rise and recognition of the to the underbelly of degeneracy, secrecy and transsexual as a gender deviant figure of ‘both guilt, have left “largely intact” the dominant and not man and woman’. In doing so, the Singapore values of “(r)ationality, order, illiberal pragmatics of medical and literary meritocracy, elitism, family values and material modernisation have inadvertently produced the comfort” (p. 127). In Glass Cathedral , Yeoh transsexual as a figure that negotiates not only further shows how the novel “reinvigorate(s) the the indigenous pre-gay and the Eurocentric queer by insisting on a queer which is firmly post-queer (Jackson, 2001), but also the local embedded within the particulars of Singapore modern. As a trope of disjunctive acceleration, culture” (p. 130). Yeoh argues these two books the sister transsexual exemplifies this mode of display a “transgressive hybridity” where “the displacement. capacity of a hybrid, localized queer” can “trouble normative social categories” (p. 131). Two other seminal ‘coming out’ novels, Johann S. Lee’s Peculiar Chris (1992) and Andrew Koh’s Yeoh’s transgressive hybridity highlights how the Glass Cathedral (1995), further show how the gay man has emerged in the logic of illiberalism gay man has emerged as a critical site to as an effect of pragmatic complicity and challenge colonial heteronormativity. Peculiar performing conformity. Pragmatic complicity is Chris is the first novel to deal with the theme of the process of complying, in the sense of being coming out. The author wrote the book when he practical, with the norms in order to ‘fit in’ and was nineteen and in the army doing ‘National ‘pass’. Performing conformity is also a similar Service’ (NS). NS is a two-year compulsory process of enacting socially approved models so government project aimed at training young as to suit the norms of the hegemonic culture. men to fit the standards of national masculinity. While the rituals of both are similar, performing Glass Cathedral , commended in the 1994 conformity points more specifically to the types Singapore Literature Awards, centers around of everyday rehearsals that are based on the Collin’s association with James, whose father is assumption that the norms of the status quo are the director of a multi-national company. It maintained through repetitions. Pragmatic explores Colin’s initial infatuation with James’s complicity, on the other hand, does not rebellious and alternative arts lifestyle, and his emphasise the repetition of everyday rituals; relationship with Norbet, a gay priest who rather, it singles out how forms of conduct are encourages him to reconcile his sexuality with self-consciously altered by groups and/or faith. Colin refuses the material trappings of individuals in order to accord with existing James’s gay lifestyle and chooses, instead, to and/or new modes of governance. Colin’s work work with street kids and prostitutes. ethic, together with Chris’s choice of economic privilege, domesticity, monogamy and family Paul Yeoh (2006) examines these two novels ties, resonate with the Asian values of against the genre of gay protest literature and communitarianism and neo-Confucianism. These within the contexts of national patriotism and signifiers show how the pragmatism of the globalisation of queer. In particular, he Singapore’s performance principle has focuses on how these texts offer queer subjects irrationally also created an environment where avenues to challenge and revise locally, the non-liberal local gay discourse of catch-up nationally and globally endorsed models of has emerged to replicate the homonormative

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values of neo-liberalism in the West. In this Redefining Pragmatism: Doing Gay, Doing artifice, the logics of temporal and spatial Butch progress that characterise queer liberation in the West are out of joint, unsettling the teleology of West’s pragmatism differs from Chua’s rights, recognition and liberation. commonplace conception of pragmatism. The commonplace conception of pragmatism is These modes of disjunctive acceleration and evident from The New Shorter Oxford English displacement are further evident in theatre. Dictionary, where pragmatism is defined as “the Theatre has the longest history of GLBTIQ truth of any assertion is to be evaluated from its representations dating back to the 1980s. It is practical consequences and its bearing on also the site where politics are explicitly human interests” (1993, vol. 2, p. 2319). This contested, especially through censorship (Chua, popular definition emphasises ‘getting things 2004). In spite of these, theatre continues to done or tackling difficulties in the most practical receive the highest percentage of funding from way’, or a ‘can do and whatever works’ attitude. the National Arts Council, over and above music, Robert Westbrook (2005) cautions against this visual arts, dance, arts administration and apparent conjunction between commonplace literature (Chong, 2005). Non-profit companies and philosophical pragmatism. He criticises the such as The Necessary Stage, Action Theatre popular currency of the commonplace definition and Wild Rice are renowned for staging gay and as “pragmatism at its worst” (p. x). West’s lesbian themed plays, and playwrights such as pragmatism extends such commonplace Eleanor Wong, Ivan Heng and Alfian Sa’at have definitions with a focus on social action and become local queer icons. Terence Chong creative democracy. Arising out of American criticises how the government predominantly philosophy following the writings Ralph W. funds English-language plays as a strategy for Emerson, Charles S. Peirce, William James, John asserting the country’s global consciousness Dewey and Richard Rorty, pragmatism is a (2005, p. 562). method that advocates how ideas are connected to action, theory and practice, and challenges Eng-Beng Lim (2005a), on the other hand, the traditional belief that action comes after argues that the use of English-language cannot knowledge (De Waal, 2005, p. 4). Peirce’s anti- simply be viewed as following the universalising Cartesianism and Dewey’s engaged strategies of Western culture. Lim examines the instrumentalism, for example, emphasise how groundbreaking 2000 gay male theatrical experimentalism and experience constitute production, Asian Boys Vol. 1 , and shows how knowledge as a product of a situation that the colonial legacy of the figure of the Orientalist requires resolution. gay boy is recuperated and re-imagined through the diasporic and inter-Asian circuits of “Indian In The American Evasion of Philosophy , West gods, Japanese pop icons, Chinese (1989) highlights the radical potentials of rickshawmen, samsui women, and Malay online pragmatism through its focus on “future- chat addicts” (2005a, p. 403). These different oriented instrumentalism” (p. 5), preoccupation modalities of queer production highlight what with the “materiality of language” (p. 4) and the Lim suggests as the tactics of “glocalqueering”, evasion of an epistemology-centered philosophy. a process of revealing the “complex circuits of West points to how these distinctions have mobility that follow neither a model of bilateral contemporary appeal because it shares with cultural transmission (West to East and vice postmodernism the scepticism on the fixity of versa) nor a contextual study of national truth. Their critical, destabilising and creative productions that attempts to locate a drives also have a moral and ethical emphasis quintessential Singaporean queerness” (p. 387). on how power and social hierarchy can be Although Lim calls these tactics “a set of transformed: “Its basic impulse is a plebian pragmatic homoerotic practices with many inter- radicalism that fuels an antipatrician Asian and diasporic resonances” (p. 404), he rebelliousness for the moral aim of enriching does not elaborate how pragmatism works as an individuals and expanding democracy” (p. 5). instrumental logic for understanding this optic. Influenced by Marxism, Black social thought and Cornel West’s philosophy of pragmatism is liberation theology, he shares with Dewey a insightful here. pragmatism that promotes “creative democracy by means of critical action and social action” (p. 212). West’s pragmatism is less a philosophical inquiry concerned with the nature of knowledge 155

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and the fallibility of truth, and more about practice that has some potency and effect that knowledge as a form of cultural criticism where makes a difference in the world” (West, 1989, p. meanings and solutions are put forward as a 232). response to social crisis and problems. His pragmatism is ‘prophetic’ because he draws These characteristics of pragmatism as a form of upon his Christian background to express the democratic faith that is action oriented, problems about black nihilism in America (West, concerned with consequences, and possessing a 1993). Religion, however, is not a requisite for dynamic position of social and cultural critique, prophetic pragmatism: is significant to extend the relevance of pragmatism to Singapore’s creative queer I have dubbed it ‘prophetic’ in that it harks back to cultural productions. Positioned in this context, Jewish and Christian tradition of prophets who the glocalqueering optic offered by Lim’s gay brought urgent and compassionate critique to beat boys can be further conceptualised not simply as on the evils of their day. The mark of the prophet a commonplace set of pragmatic moves under is to speak the truth in love with courage – come the governance of cultural liberalisation or the what may. Prophetic pragmatism proceeds from this impulse. It neither requires a religious alliances created by the shared histories of foundation nor entails a religious perspective, yet cultural proximity and diasporic homelands, but prophetic pragmatism is compatible with certain a conscious mode of ‘doing gay’ that bears a religious outlooks (p. 233). commitment to challenging the shame of gay sex. Gary Dowsett (2003) uses the term ‘doing Charles W. Mills criticises the casual synthesis gay’ to differentiate it from ‘being gay’. ‘Being between pragmatism and religion. He puts forth gay’ refers to the rights-based politics of fighting two interpretive solutions to understand this stigma and discrimination while ‘doing gay’ synthesis; the first comprising a thin refers to fighting the shame that comes with gay “(theologically neutral kind) having universalist sex. Following Warner’s (1999) thesis that aspirations” and; the second, a thick “(religiously identity politics have resulted in the committed kind)” (2001, p. 198). “For prophetic normalisation of gay men into mainstream pragmatism to be taken as an interesting and culture through the erasure of sex, Dowsett viable contender,” he suggests, “it must be argues identity politics can still be meaningful if taken in the religious sense” (p. 199). Mark it focuses on ‘doing gay’. In Lim’s accounts, the Wood argues this synthesis is not at all casual, spectacle of the boys can be argued as but critical; it represents “the existentialist issues potentially demonstrating this practice of ‘doing of dread, despair, and death and the political gay’. Lim points to how these men follow the concerns of democracy, equality, and justice” “global gay worlds featuring the homoerotic cult (2000, p. 8). Hilary Putnam succinctly calls this of male youth and urban male practices…(They) synthesis of empowerment and engagement a wear muscle tank tops with feather boas, use form of “democratic faith” (2001, p. 35). skincare and cosmetic products, work out at Putnam’s useful departure point is also echoed trendy gyms, and attend pride parades and by Westbrook who describes West’s prophetic circuit dance parties” (2005b, p. 296). Although pragmatism as a “reappropriation of Lim contends they exploit the global gay pragmatism” (2006, p. 202) that aesthetic, depoliticise a homoerotic aesthetic, reconceptualises philosophy as a politically- and share no affiliation with the local grassroots engaged attempt to “transform linguistic, social, or a radical politics of sexuality, I would like to cultural, and political traditions for the purposes critically suggest here that these men, in their of increasing the scope of individual visible sexualised body aesthetics, embody the development and democratic operations” (West, self-fashioning ethics of ‘doing gay’. By going to 1989, p. 230). West’s prophetic pragmatism is the gyms, dance clubs, and saunas, and thus located “in the everyday life experiences of participating in body cultivation, cruising and ordinary people” and shares not only with public sex, they reappropriate what have been Marxism’s critique of class, but also Gramsci’s shamed in the post-AIDS West as the decadent praxis of the common sense and Foucault’s places and practices of gay sex. In the pre-AIDS operations of power (1989, p. 213). Rosemary era, these practices formed some of the central Cowan elegantly summarises it as “a practical, tenets of radical GLBTIQ activism in the West. engaged philosophy and a cultural commentary From the psychedelic trance of dance parties, that attempts to explain America to itself” (2003, the rites of cruising to the obsession with body p. 55). Central here is its status as a “material building, they described the faith-like rituals of force” for individuality and democracy, “a prophetic pragmatism by actualising the material

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practices of everyday life that connected faith to Not all of them are outwardly ‘masculine’. Some politics, art, literacy and economic production. refer to themselves as pretty boys, most spot Queer activism in this context exemplified the the trendy Asian bishonen long hair, and very rhetorical performance and social action of few flex their pectoral muscles. They don hip liberation theology (Herndl and Bauer 2003). hop gear, smart suits and ties, leather shoes, Warner shows how, in the post-AIDS West, cowboy shirts or just plain street wear. They these practices have been disavowed by the come from all walks of life; university students, rights-based discourse through embracing the sales assistants, chefs, teachers and graphic stigma of being gay but not the shame of gay designers. Common to all is the breast binder. sex (1999, p. 33). For the gay men in Singapore, The breast binder is made out of DIY elastic these reappropriated practices embody the most bands, bandages, duct tape or clear wraps, or abject and the least reputable acts of ‘doing professionally manufactured spandex and gay’, and in doing so, resonate with what Velcro-adjusted sports bras and tee-shirts in Warner has described as the ethics of a queer assorted colours purchased on the Herstory life, as a “special kind of sociability that holds website or at the events. The breast binder is queer culture together” and a “relation to not only di rigeur among the contestants, but all others” that begins by acknowledging the shame young butches on the streets, in the clubs and of gay sex (p. 33). They also recall Foucault’s at the bars. Unlike the older generation of ethics of care as a set of self-fashioning butches who may wear a normal bra with a tee- practices designed to empower the self and shirt under a baggy shirt, these young butches engage the self through knowledge in its flaunt the flat chest at every opportunity, with conduct with others (1997). The ethics of ‘doing sleeveless tank tops or tight-fitting shirts. The gay’ in this manner exposes the shame used by competition has popularised the breast binder as both the straight and gay mainstream to repress the technology par excellence in the practice of gay identity; it focuses on the materiality of ‘doing butch’ in Singapore. It has liberated the everyday life experiences to emphasise how the sexual shame associated with being butch. self is governed through individual cultivation, group management and official representation. Where ‘doing gay’ is directly related to the As pragmatism, it recognises the agency, shame of gay sex, ‘doing butch’ is also directly choices and constraints by which groups related to the most abject and debased of construct their self-presence and self-autonomy. lesbian gender, what Sally Munt has theorised as This befits a consensual society like Singapore the shame experienced by the butch (1998). that prides itself on the successful interpellation Munt describes such sexual shame through the of its communitarian ideology to socially butch’s experience of her body, breasts, genitals discipline its population and self-cultivate the and sexual behaviour, as well as her male individual so that he/she knows the ethics of impersonation as a “failed copy” (p. 5). She also her/his conduct in its relationship to others. My locates the butch’s fantasy of impermeability as final example of creative entertainment will a sad and brave act expended to fight the toil of further demonstrate such pragmatics of ‘doing maintaining her masculine body. Shame, Munt butch’ in the lesbian nightlife of Singapore. argues, “is the foundational moment in lesbian identity,… (in) butch/femme identity” (p. 7). Since 2001, Singapore’s annual popular Butch Unlike the macho bulldagger or stone butches in Hunt competition has instituted a new sensibility the West, the musculature of the Asian or of ‘doing butch’. Organised by Club Herstory, a Singaporean butch is more lithe and less slight. lesbian-owned events management company Breasts, rather than womanly hips, are the first and an online lesbian portal, these competitions external physiological signs of the butch’s failure have drawn hundreds of butches out of the to pass and the beginning of her internalisation closet and legitimated ‘doing butch’ as an of shame. In these competitions and in the embodied way of everyday life in the country. materiality of everyday life among the young One thousand six hundred people attended the butches, the spectre of the breast is first finals at Zouk, a well-known dance club reconstituted through the explicit use of the located at the Chinatown creative precinct. breast binder as a new signifier of ‘doing butch’. During the event contestants parade in a ‘Doing butch’ revisions shames with a new pageant, field questions on dating and romance, agency, making it a source of empowerment and pass a skills test ranging from singing, kung and engagement, and a new material force for fu, dancing to stand-up comedy. The average individuality and sexual democracy. As Gea age of the contestants is between 19 and 22. Swee Jean reports on the 2006 competition, “On

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pageant nights, the sheer amount of lesbian event staged as a protest during the National visibility creates a palpable sense of excitement. Day celebrations in August, my colleague was One can almost sense a proud, unspoken refused a conference visa to speak on sexual declaration among the women who attend — a orientation and the law, my queer friends were declaration along the lines of, ‘I’m lesbian and banned from gathering in the park for a pride proud of it!’” (2006). fun run, and gay teachers have had their blogs removed or their teaching registration revoked. Conclusion While MM Lee’s speech was motivated by the pragmatism of cultural liberalisation, these This paper has critically discussed how the prohibitions were also motivated by a pragmatic cultural liberalisation of the creative economy appeal to appease the conservative majority. has enabled the emergence of a uniquely local Rather than relying on commonplace Singapore queer culture characterised by the pragmatism, Singapore’s logic of pragmatism, in logic of illiberal pragmatics. It has also extended its desire to ‘catch up’ with the West, should this logic with the philosophy of pragmatics as a take its cue from the radical potentials of method for critically instrumentalising creative philosophical pragmatism as a moral platform democracy and social action. I began by that encourages civic participation and social introducing the specificity of illiberal pragmatics engagement, for it is through this optic that within the developmental and postcolonial democratic (and even nationalist and patriotic) capitalist logic of Singapore. Illiberal pragmatism faith can be sustained through the ethics of is characterised by the ambivalence between actions and consequences. non-liberalism and neo-liberalism, rationalism and irrationalism. I pointed to how this logic is Author Note evident in the contemporary (il)legal discourses of homosexuality in the country. I further Audrey Yue is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at The showed how the new creative industries University of Melbourne. She is co-editor of provided a fertile arena to consolidate this logic Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia as central to the production of GLBTIQ cultures (2003) and AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Gender in Singapore. I argued how a local Singaporean and Sexuality (2008, in press). This article is queer culture has been constituted, not as a from her book in progress on sexuality and the result of the recognition of rights and liberation, creative city in Singapore. Contact: Cultural but through the disjunctive acceleration caused Studies Program, School of Culture and by economic and cultural reforms. In the Communication, The University of Melbourne, popular cultures of contemporary gay fiction, Victoria 3010. Email: [email protected] gay theatre and lesbian nightlife, the sister transsexual, the Asian Margi Gras gay boy, and the tomboy butch have emerged as exemplary References figures of this creative queer culture. In their reconstitution of pragmatism with democratic Bhabha, H. (1999). Arrivals and departures. In faith, cultural critique and social action, they H. Naficy (Ed.), Home, exile, homeland: film, have reclaimed the shame of their deviant media, and the politics of place (pp.vii-xii). homosexualities and localised new embodiments New York: Routledge. of doing queer. Chong, T. (2005). From global to local: As I write reminiscing my last visit in 2006 to a Singapore’s cultural policy and its Club Herstory event surrounded by a sea of consequences. Critical Asian Studies , 37, 553- breast-binding young baby butches, I can’t help 569. but refrain from the emboldened grin I usually cast upon the sign of lesbian pride. In recent Chua, B.H. (1995). Communitarian ideology and months, the gay debate has sparked another democracy in Singapore . London: Routledge. round of recriminations in the public media. Spurred by Minister Mentor Lee Kwan Yew’s 23 Chua, B.H. (1997). Political legitimacy and April 2007 speech to Reuters about the housing: Stakeholding in Singapore . London: inevitability of legalising homosexuality, the Routledge. government has, yet again, irrationally clamped down on gay activities in the country. During the Chua, B.H. (2004). Cultural industry and the recent annual 2007 IndigNation queer pride next phase of economic development of 158

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Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2007

‘GAY MARRIAGE’, LESBIAN WEDDING

BARBARA BAIRD

Abstract Dare and Lucy in Sydney on one occasion before the wedding and, with a few drinks, we had a This paper juxtaposes analysis of the current great time laughing and working out a plan for prominence of the debate over ‘gay marriage’ the wedding ceremony (they had done lots of with a story of one lesbian wedding. It research and thinking). It wasn't until I visited contextualises non-heterosexual marriages with them the day before the wedding, and saw the an historical account of female-female marriages marquee on the back lawn behind Lucy's suggesting that they both are part of a long parents' home, in front of her father's vineyard, history and an entirely new phenomenon. In that it sunk in that this was for real: this was a particular the paper draws on Canadian wedding. sociologist Mariana Valverde’s (2006) claim that we are seeing a historically unique sexual The guests were composed in roughly equal object/subject - ‘the respectable same sex numbers of Lucy's family, incorporating four couple’. It suggests that the conditions for the generations, and old family friends, and friends emergence of this new entity lie in neo-liberal of Lucy's and Dare's, mostly thirty-something economics and politics, the practices of identity- dykes from Sydney, who were camping around conferring consumption in particular, as well as the vineyard. Dare's sister had flown from in the efforts of gay and lesbian and other Canada to represent her family at the ceremony. activists and those keen to live the life of ‘the We were a mostly white, mostly middle class respectable same sex couple’. The paper draws group of people of a wide age range. I was on Judith Butler’s analysis of ‘gay marriage’ to accompanied by my girlfriend Vicki and our urge caution and critical thinking in relation to friend Kate, a Christmas visitor from Adelaide, the state, the site to which most campaigning on who Lucy and Dare had graciously invited to the gay marriage is directed, and draws attention in wedding. The three of us had all performed as particular to the racialised nature of the state in drag kings at Feast, Adelaide’s queer cultural Australia. It concludes, however, with a return to festival, and Kate and Vicki attended the the singular lesbian wedding to argue that the wedding in drag. I chose a more sedate effects of any one embodiment of new or costume, in keeping with my role and need not transitional social and cultural forms cannot be to upstage the brides. contained by any one categorisation. The afternoon wedding ceremony was a mixture Introduction: The Wedding of traditions. The weather was perfect. After drinks in the house guests were asked to move One weekend in June 1999, at home in Hobart, out to the marquee. Dare had stayed the night my nephew Stuart and I were visited by two some distance away and we waited for her to lesbian friends of his (and acquaintances of arrive. She and Lucy had not seen each other’s mine) who were visiting from Sydney. Lucy and outfits. Dare’s floor-length dress was red and Dare announced over afternoon tea that they purple with gold trim; Lucy’s waistcoat, made by had decided to get married at the end of the her mother and finished only the day before, year at Lucy's parents’ rural home in the north was of similar colours and was worn over a t- of Tasmania. I was completely taken aback shirt and pants. The dress and the waistcoat when Lucy and Dare asked me if I would be were both made from Asian garments recut to their marriage celebrant … and I eventually said be western formal wear, symbolising for them 'yes'. Specially printed invitations to ‘a wedding’ the combination of tradition and current went out in good time. Guests were referred to location. When Dare arrived the two women a gift registry at Peters of Kensington .1 I visited walked through an archway, which had been constructed by Stuart and another friend, to join the rest of us inside the marquee. The ceremony was loosely constructed around the elements of 1 Peters of Kensington is a nationally known Sydney a (European, Christian) traditional wedding as retail outlet that specialises in handling wedding gift described in a wedding book that Dare had registers.

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purchased from a Sydney newsagent but also anthropologists documented relationships drew from second-wave feminist spiritual between Aboriginal women in several locations. practises and included an acknowledgment of The historiography of non-Aboriginal women’s the Aboriginal ownership of the land where we relationships begins with attention to documents gathered. Lucy’s sister and others lead us in from the convict period that show sexual and song, including a song by Tiddas, 2 and different emotional relationships between women that friends had different speaking roles. Lucy and included gender diversity among the partners Dare exchanged vows and the final act of the and fierce determination on the part of women wedding involved everyone coming to the stage who wanted to be together. Many of the stories at the front of the marquee where the of relationships between women that have been proceedings were conducted and choosing a excavated indicate relationships that have been pebble to place in a spiral pattern on the lived as marriages. Doubtless there have also wedding table. My role was minimal. I did not been women who shared sexual and emotional pronounce the couple married, but rather intimacy, and economic and other practical deferred to their own authority to declare support, who did not experience themselves as themselves married to each other. married, but many have described themselves through the classic trope of marriage - union . Lucy and Dare had engaged a local caterer for The historiography of marriages and other the wedding reception, also held in the relationships divides into accounts of marquee, and Lucy's father provided the wines. relationships between women, and those Speeches were made by Lucy’s father and between men with female bodies and women, brother, Dare’s sister, a friend, and the two the latter often living openly as man and wife. 3 brides. Lucy and Dare had handmade all the Conventionally gendered women living in dinner plates from which we ate at a commercial relationships with other women have generally workshop near their home in Sydney and not publicly identified themselves as married everyone left with a plate with ‘Dare and Lucy, couples until very recently but autobiographical December 1999’ inscribed on the back as a accounts from women living in the 1950s and memento. since tell of private marriage ceremonies and rituals that included the exchange of rings and I want to use this story of queer cultural change of name by one or both women among production to reflect historically on the other practices. contemporary phenomenon of the lesbian or gay wedding, and the political issue of ‘gay In my discussion of this history (Baird, 2005) I marriage’. I introduce these reflections with a made the point that the exclusive reservation of story of a specific wedding in order to juxtapose the legal status of marriage for relationships some general comments I make about the issue between men and women has been based on of ‘gay marriage’, and the possible exclusions the repeated exclusion from cultural legitimacy and foreclosures in the cultural and political of marriages between women (and no doubt realm that debate around the issue enacts, with between men). In several cases from the lesbian attention to one particular wedding and the historiography it was not just that marriages multiple and contradictory meanings that it both between women were judged to be not constructed and deconstructed. legitimate. Often the authority and status of heterosexual marriage, and the authority and A History conjugal rights of a male husband, were built on the delegitimation of the relationship between Let me begin by stating that the wedding I the women and the delegitimation of female describe is part of a long history of marriages claims to gender or sexual authority (e.g., Ford, between women. In an article published in 2005 1995). Building on this account of the reliance of (Baird, 2005) I traced the available history of the superior identity of heterosexual marriage on female-female relationships as they have been the exclusion of lesbian and other queer documented in the small but growing body of lesbian history in Australia. Early female 3 This broad brush divide is overly simplistic and collapses a wide variety of female bodied people and 2 Tiddas were a threepiece band made up of two relationships among them and significant Aboriginal women and one non-Aboriginal woman historiographical debates about the importance of 162who played around Australia and recorded music these categorisations. For example see Halberstam through the 1990s. 1998.

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marriages, I used Judith Butler’s (1991) clever both the mainstream and then the gay and deconstruction of the hegemonic binary lesbian press (Mitchell, 2002). While the demand relationship between heterosexuality and for the legal recognition of ‘same sex homosexuality, where heterosexuality is the relationships’ at the state level had been the key original and homosexuality is the copy, to make issue for lesbian and gay politics in Australia two other points. First, that we should not see since the mid 1990s, (and has been largely marriages between women as simply mimicry or successful), the demand to legalise gay appropriation of the heterosexual form. It is not marriage, a separate matter of federal that they are something else entirely, nor that jurisdiction, was not prominent in this period. they are not in some ways influenced by the Gay marriage leap-frogged to the front of the forms of (legal) heterosexual marriage but, to political agenda only when, in the lead-up to the borrow from Butler, they are not determined by 2004 federal election, the incumbent Coalition them (pp. 313-4). Further, we must reject the government, with support from the Labor party, superior value given to heterosexual marriage explicitly legislated against it. 4 The government forms. was responding to legal action initiated by a small number of lesbian and gay couples who With respect to my claiming of a long history of had married legally in Canada and were seeking female-female marriages (and I assume of male- legal status for their overseas marriages in male marriage) it is, however, notable that Australia. It was also recognising an issue with lesbian and gay couples are almost entirely potentially divisive election value. Kerryn and absent in the history of the post-Stonewall gay Jackie’s marriage was not the first to feature and lesbian rights movements in Australia. In prominently in the Australian media, although it the historical accounts of the gay and lesbian did establish a new standard for the movements (e.g., Willett, 2000) couples hardly normalisation of lesbian (and gay) marriages. In figure at all and it was not until the early-mid the three years since the Australian government 1990s that the legal recognition of lesbian and insisted that marriage was between a man and a gay relationships became part of the political women Sir Elton John has married his male agenda of the various lesbian and gay activist partner of many years in the UK (in December groups. While the emergence of the Gay 2005) and received the usual media attention Liberation movement ushered in an un- that comes to celebrities of his stature; the US precedented visibility for homosexuality, and the television series Queer As Folk , which screens in ‘reverse discourse’ of homosexuality (Foucault, Australia, has featured two marriages involving 1990) took on a new cultural confidence as well lead characters in its last two series which as a new style of political resistance, couples screened in 2004 and 2005; and, locally, the have not been at the forefront of the marriage of Adelaide gay activist Ian Purcell to representation of the movement, in its own his long-time partner Stephen Leahy in Canada materials or in its representation in popular in July 2006 featured prominently in the media. I have argued (Baird, 2005, p. 256) that, Adelaide press on their return (Wheatley, 2006). at least in the early days of gay and lesbian Gay marriage is now a political issue on which movements in Australia, homosexual mainstream politicians comment as a matter of partnerships were too shameful for the more course (e.g., Anon.). conservative liberal reform organisations of the movement and too respectable for the gay I have found a brief article by Canadian scholar liberation and radical lesbian groups. Mariana Valverde (2006) extraordinarily helpful in understanding the normalisation of gay and Gay Marriage and ‘the Respectable lesbian couples and the recent prominence of Same-Sex Couple’ gay marriage as a political issue. While my 2005 article placed contemporary gay and lesbian The article that I wrote three years ago pivoted couples in a historically continuous tradition, on the national publicity achieved by prominent Valverde takes the opposite approach. She media medico Kerryn Phelps and teacher Jackie announces a discontinuity , indeed a new entity Stricker when they married in 1997. Their in the history of sexuality. Both following and marriage was celebrated first by a liberal rabbi in superceding Michel Foucault’s (1990) ground- New York and then later confirmed at a lavish wedding party in Sydney, making headlines in 4 A brief but comprehensive overview of state and 163 federal legislation, reformed and in need of reform, can be found in HREOC 2007.

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breaking work in the history of sexuality, she have sex with men’. She claims that AIDS claims that there is a new object (and so experts are disinterested in these men’s subject) emerging out of the space previously identities. They are, through a public health filled only by ‘homosexuality’. She recalls a framework, concerned only with their passage from a 1987 book by another French behaviours. The centrepiece of her argument is philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, which while that we are witnessing a post homosexual era is admiring Foucault, predicted that the ‘sexuality’ the ‘respectable same-sex couple’. She observes that he so brilliantly identified for us was already that this couple is not understood with reference then ‘in the process of disappearing’ (Baudrillard to truths about their inner selves. Nor are they quoted in Valverde, p. 156). For Valverde the understood, interestingly, with reference to sex. demise of ‘sexuality’ is signalled by the They are not ‘two homosexuals added together’ ‘respectable same-sex couple’. (p. 156). They are something quite new.

A brief rehearsal of her argument is needed for It is relevant to note that Valverde writes from my purposes here. Valverde (2006) starts with Canada, where gay and lesbian marriage was the now widely-accepted Foucauldian account legalised nationally in 2005 and where gay and that asserts that ‘homosexuality’ (and indeed lesbian couples come from all around the world ‘sexuality’) is a historically recent invention. It to marry. She is thus also in close proximity to has only been since the middle of the nineteenth the USA where gay marriage has achieved century that sexual acts between men (the prominence as a political issue in the 2000s and standard case) or between women have where several state or municipal jurisdictions signified a deep-seated truth about those who have legalised gay marriage – although only in participate in them. Before that time the acts Massachusetts has the legislation which enables were significant, primarily as sin, and might legal marriage for lesbian and gay couples attract punishment, but they did not reveal an remained. She makes her argument about the essential truth about those who did them. arrival of the ‘respectable same-sex couple’ Valverde writes that ‘sexuality – in the West but through consideration of legal rulings concerning not in the East – came to be regarded as that lesbian and gay couples in Canada’s Supreme which is most secret and therefore most Court and media representations and her own authentic about “the self”, the key, in other observations of gay and lesbian wedding words, to personal identity’ (p. 155). The era, up couples. What she finds is gay and lesbian to the 1970s at least, where “the homosexual” couples defined not as ‘homosexuals’, those was probably the most successful of all deviant deviants identified through their sexual practices identities’ (p. 156) was characterised by and understood to be essentially different to attempts to identify and classify this person, those who occupy the unmarked category of the through a variety of disciplinary gazes, medicine normal. Rather she finds ‘respectable same sex and the psy disciplines prominent among them. couples’ defined through financial concerns, An early effect of the Gay Liberation movements consumption and wedding plans. that appeared in many Western countries in the early 1970s was the growth of identity based Nobody cares about their sexuality – including, politics where gay men and lesbians themselves apparently, the parties involved. The nonsexual fortified this discourse of ‘the homosexual’, transactions that make up the everyday fabric of embracing this identity with pride rather than coupledom are what the [legal and media] texts find worth recounting. In the Star [Canada’s being tormented and shamed by it. largest circulation daily] one finds that the narrative of the happy Toronto couple is wholly Valverde (2006) identifies three historically made up of florists’ bills and plane tickets for recent phenomena that challenge this identity relatives. The narrative of the divorcing couple of based model of sexuality in general, and ‘the the M and H Supreme Court decision, for its part, homosexual’ in particular. First, she refers to the is made up of joint tenancy agreements and bank refusal of identity categories by those, often loan documents (2006, p. 162). homosexually active individuals, who choose the amorphous and fluid label ‘queer’ over identity Valverde does not mention ‘love’ among the labels that tend to narrow or specify (like ‘gay’ defining features of the ‘respectable same sex or ‘lesbian’). Second, she points to the invention couple’. In my observations ‘love’ is apparent in in AIDS discourse of the category ‘men who many popular representations of lesbian and gay weddings and marriages, and in the demands 164

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for legal gay marriage. The website for Valverde’s analysis, but catching hold of her Australian Marriage Equality, the national group dramatic and prescient vision of an entirely new focused solely on the legalisation of gay object/subject of history, and the shift in marriage, begins ‘For many Australians marriage historical eras it announces, seems to me to is a profoundly meaningful way to demonstrate promise more explanatory power than Seidman love and commitment.’ (Australian Marriage et al’s relatively more measured identification of Equality). Carl and Andrew, the two men who trends. star in ‘Just Married’, the Australian documentary made in response to the Australian Valverde’s (2006) argument explains why federal government’s move against gay marriage couples have been so absent, as publicly in 2004 (Jones, 2005), repeatedly profess their identified activist subjects and as objects of love for each other, and members of both men’s political debate, in Australian gay and lesbian biological families repeatedly testify to this love. activism until the last ten years, and in popular References to sex are muted. Love has culture representations until even more recently. historically been opposed to sex in discourses of In a discursive field dominated by ‘the sexuality, with heterosexuality signifying the homosexual’, the couple in all its banality was former and homosexuality the latter. Love thus not the point. Sex was. And it was sex, whether helps to broaden the distance between ‘the sinful, or pathological, or the site of difference homosexual’ and ‘respectable same sex couples’ and pride, that was the site of identity even further. Damien Riggs (2006) argues that construction. But sex is not the ground for the the invocation of ‘love’ plays a similar role in construction of the ‘respectable same sex campaigns for the rights of gay and lesbian couple’. Valverde’s argument also explains what parents. It does so, however, by aligning them I have always regarded as the curious adoption, with ‘the forms of national love that are by lawmakers, politicians, and gay and lesbian currently sanctioned, which are founded upon activists themselves , of the term ‘same sex both the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty couple’. The replacement of ‘homosexual’ or and the construction of other groups of people ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ with ‘same sex’ effects in this as enemies of the nation’ (p. 82). context what Valverde refers to as the ‘desexualisation of gay rights’ (p. 161). This shift Valverde’s (2006) argument – cheeky as it is – is not only turns away from sexuality in highly appealing. It is not inconsistent with other categorising these relationships, but arguably accounts of historical change in the lives of gay also from gender as it positions lesbian and gay and lesbian people in the post-Stonewall, post relationships through an (essentialist) discourse second wave feminism, era. Sociologist Steven of sex, an observation which requires more Seidman and his colleagues (1999), for example, thought than I have space for here. Valverde’s have argued that ‘the closet’, the hinge that argument also explains why, in Australia, the divides “a private life where homosexuality can public face of gay marriage campaigns is more be expressed and a public life where one passes often than not couples in their twenties and as heterosexual” (p. 19), is declining in social thirties. Those who have grown up in the wake significance in the USA. Their research, based in of the social changes initiated by feminism and interviews conducted in the mid 1990s, finds lesbian and gay activism but often with no that many gay and lesbian individuals have cultural memory of the sexual past and its subjectively ‘normalized’ and socially ‘routinized’ politics are most likely to locate themselves in a their homosexuality. They locate the closet, and field marked by the ‘respectable same sex the practice of coming out, as emblematic of a couple’. pre-Stonewall period, where secrecy-disclosure and private-public were binaries that created the Her argument is speculative. It is also clearly heightened self-consciousness of the political. Valverde (2006) makes little attempt to homosexual. As these binary structures and the hide her derision of the wedding couples. She discourse of sexuality that produces them break notes that the middle class soon-to-be-married down in contemporary social and cultural life (if male couple who feature in the Toronto Star’s not yet fully in social policy and the law) 2004 Pride Day special section are obsessed individuals are less likely to locate their with “the color scheme, the food, the homosexuality as the central element of their entertainment, and the guest list” and describes identities. This account is not inconsistent with this as “a feminist nightmare” (p. 159 ). I can

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only agree. (I can, however, also appreciate the comparative ease with which the legislation was politics and aesthetics of their camp hysteria). passed was in part an effect of the discourse of Her implied opposition is to their consumerism, ‘the new Tasmania’. This term refers to an their respectability and their foreshortened alleged economic and social rejuvenation in political horizon. Tasmania and functions as a branding of the state which allows and demands progressive The Conditions for the New liberal signs of Tasmania’s desirability in a global economy. ‘The new Tasmania’ makes legible gay Economics is one place to start to explain the tourism, gay home ownership, gay rights, gay conditions of this historical shift, and indeed investment and, since 2003, the legal economics has been identified elsewhere as the recognition of lesbian and gay couples. While primary site of sexual citizenship for gay men the reform would not have happened without and, secondarily, lesbians (Evans, 1993). In her the energies of gay and lesbian activists, it also contemporary Marxist critique of ‘white falls firmly into the phenomenon that Arnaldo weddings’ in the USA published in 1999, Chrys Cruz-Malavé and Martin Manalansan Jr (2002) Ingraham identifies what she brilliantly describe as a rather sinister mode of describes as ‘the wedding-industrial complex’. globalization: “the appropriation and deployment This multibillion dollar transnational wedding of queer subjectivities, cultures and political industry includes “the sale of a diverse range of agendas for the legitimation of hegemonic products, many of which are produced outside institutions presently in discursive crisis” (p. 5). the US” (p. 28). The industrial complex in turn This mode is also at work in the recent relies on what she calls the “wedding-ideological announcement by Telstra, Australia’s leading complex” (p. 82). Ingraham observes the ways telco, of an overhaul of staff policies to remove that race and class structure both the industrial all discrimination against lesbian and gay and ideological complexes. White middle class employees. A critical account characterises women are those with most power to consume Telstra’s twenty-first century neo-liberal work wedding products (p. 31) and “the icon of the culture by “the setting of ever-increasing beautiful white bride” works to persuade us all performance targets and rigorous monitoring of that “what counts as beautiful and marriageable individuals’ time and movements” (McDermott, is white” (p. 97). Her main argument, however, 2007, n.p.). Those employees in gay and lesbian locates the wedding as a lynchpin of the relationships who work under these conditions dominance of the institution of heterosexuality. will, however, no longer be denied the same Ingraham notes debates among gay and lesbian entitlements as their heterosexual counterparts communities about the value of fighting for the (Karvelas 2007). Whether as consumers or right to legal marriage but, writing just before employees, investors, tourists or home owners, the turn of the century, she does not seem gay and lesbian couples have a place in global prepared for the gusto with which North neo-liberal futures. American gay and lesbian communities have embraced the institution of marriage and the It is not my argument that new historical practice of weddings. Nor does she anticipate objects/subjects are simply the creation of the the degree to which the wedding industrial and unstoppable forces of consumerism and ideological complexes have begun to embrace capitalism or the neo-liberal re-ordering of all gay and lesbian communities, even if evidenced kinds of citizenship. And, of course, neither ‘gay’ only in advertisements in the gay and lesbian and ‘global’ nor ‘gay’ and ‘capitalism’ are press, including for the services of registered necessarily opposing terms. In a searing critique civil celebrants. of global trends geographer Heidi Nast (2002) argues that “certain EuroWhite-identified gay But consumption and a place within the wedding men – relatively youthful, of some means, and industrial and ideological complexes are not the typically childless – are well positioned to take only way that mainstream institutions and advantage of key avenues of exploitation and ideologies might provide the conditions for the profiteering in postindustrial world orders” (p. ‘respectable same sex couple’. In an article that 890). She writes of “the coming political and discusses the place of the socially progressive economic age of gay white men” (p. 899). But relationship reform enacted in Tasmania in 2003 even without the political power of wealthy (Baird, 2006) I have argued that the white gay men the ‘respectable same sex couple’

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is a product of the desires and actions of not playful parody”, she writes. “It is quite possible, only those lesbian and gay activists and their given the mixed feelings gays and lesbians have supporters who fight for relationship law reform about marriage, that the wearers were not but all those lesbian and gay couples who live themselves very clear about their intentions” (p. through the increasingly available subject 158). The arrival of ‘the respectable same sex position that this term describes. In the socially couple’ that she locates in these possibly conservative climate that has dominated semiotically confused lesbians contrasts, Australia for at least the last decade it is no however, with a queer cultural production wonder that respectability is an attractive performed ten years earlier in the Sydney Gay position to inhabit for all those who have the and Lesbian Mardi Gras. In 1994 a group of economic and cultural capital to do so. women participated in the parade dressed as brides. They were clearly not embodying, nor Of course Mariana Valverde’s (2006) account of were they seeking, respectability or legal the emergence of ‘the respectable same sex legitimation. Their costumes consisted of white couple’ is a broad brush account. It identifies a bra tops and white tulle mid-length skirts; some new object/subject that is not yet fully formed, carried riding crops, some wore white top hats. and certainly not yet fully welcomed around the They were not organised in couples. Sarah world. At the moment it is only South Africa, Zetlein’s discussion (1995) of the brides claims Canada, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium and the US them for a playful queer politics. The Mardi Gras state of Massachusetts that offer equal marriage bride, she claims, “incorporates a self-conscious rights to same sex couples (Australian Marriage awareness of the law’s legitimising and Equality). While I have a sense that legal same illegitimising effects, and plays them sex marriage is inevitable in Australia, it is accordingly” (p. 56). Jump back to the present currently not supported by either major political where brides, and grooms, feature in Adelaide’s party in this country and is actively opposed by 2007 Feast festival, the theme for which is ‘love’. the organised and influential Christian Right The festival this year includes ‘Loved Up – the (Maddox, 2005). Concomitantly, the discourse Wedding of the Year’ (Feast, p. 6) where ‘many of sexuality that Foucault claims emerged in the couples [will] publicly declare their love and middle of the nineteenth century is still apparent commitment for each other’ in a public park and in many sectors of contemporary society. then celebrate indoors with ‘queered-up’ Institutional discrimination, harassment and traditional wedding practices. Feast 2007 also homophobia-related violence, the more subtle hosts the launch of ‘Gay and Lesbian and omnipresent signs of heteronormativity and Celebrations’, Australia’s first online same-sex the marginalised subjectivities that these celebrations directory which will include “trends practices generate, are all still with us. It is and tips from South Australia’s industry experts” likely that even the most successfully and guide consumers to “local gay friendly respectable same-sex couples still negotiate the suppliers” (see closet in some aspects of their lives. But ‘the www.gayandlesbiancelebrations.com.au). sexual self-management practices’ that are the hallmark of the formation of ‘the homosexual’ The State are these days, according to Seidman et al (1999), “more situation-specific than patterning So where does this account of a transitional of a whole way of life” (p. 11). It is also the case moment in the history of sexuality (which may that respectable same sex couples are not un- be the demise of ‘sexuality’) leave me with marked by the queer politics and aesthetics that respect to the political campaigns for legal gay Valverde (2006) claims are co-emergent with marriage? My reluctance to support these ‘the respectable same sex couple’. campaigns stems primarily from their turn towards the state. Judith Butler’s essay on gay Valverde (2006) herself captures the historically marriage (2004; see also Brandzel, 2005) lays transitional nature of lesbian wedding couples in out many of my concerns. She cautions that San Francisco when she comments on the pinning one’s hopes on recognition by the state number of lesbian brides dressed in conventional means being defined by the terms already set by white wedding dresses. “It was very difficult to the state. Further, such inclusion involves the tell whether the wedding dresses were being creation of new lines of division, separating the worn in straight-up imitation of marriage or in legitimate and the about-to-be legitimate from

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those relationships and sexual practices which and culture evaporates. become more intensively inscribed as illegible. The focus on gay marriage thus involves a I wish to conclude with a return to the wedding foreclosure of the political field. It is worth in which I played a minor role. As I hope was remembering in this context that while we may clear in the telling of that particular story, Lucy desire the state’s recognition the state desires and Dare’s wedding was rich with multiple and our recognition and validation in return. States contradictory meanings. The nuances of this can use their liberal reforms to demonstrate singular event are not captured by any broad their commitment to human rights to brush historical or political analysis. As Judith international bodies or to attract tourists or to Halberstam (1998, pp. 75-110) has shown in her smooth over internal dissent (Baird, 2006). account of the formation of new female sexual and gender identities in the early decades of the My reservations are particularly sharp in relation twentieth century, the classificatory systems to the racialised nature of the state in Australia. through which experts seek to understand new It has not only been non-heterosexual objects rarely do justice to the experience and relationships that have been excluded from legal discourse of those being classified. In this definitions of marriage The ‘white Australian’ context the analysis proposed by Valverde, a state has also defined legal marriage by feminist expert, is no different. The meaning of excluding Indigenous forms and by actively Lucy and Dare’s wedding for the large group of preventing and undermining marriages involving people who participated cannot be pinned down Indigenous people. The marriages and family to any one coherent set of meanings that belong relationships of non-Anglo migrants and only to one historical era. (No doubt this is true refugees have also been treated in of all individual lesbian and gay weddings). Their discriminatory fashion. (Baird, 2005; see also wedding was marked by clear signs of feminism, Brook, 1997; Ganter, 1998; Haskins & Maynard, anti-racism, lesbian and gay pride, a dash of 2005; Kunek, 1993). I do not have the space queer, and clear respect for family and tradition here to elaborate these histories but suffice to and good hospitality. Conventional hierarchies say the racist history that underpins past between these terms were impossible to find. In disrespect for Aboriginal and many migrant fact the whole thing was a little queer. marriages and families has not been accounted Pondering whether the dykes camped in the for and the state from which we seek the legal vineyard had appropriated the trappings of the recognition of gay marriage is a state based on middle class Tasmanian family, or whether the ‘patriarchal white sovereignty’ and the family had appropriated Sydney dyke culture, or concomitant denial of the sovereignty of whether this was simply white middle class Aboriginal peoples (Moreton-Robinson, 2004). liberalism and tolerance working overtime in all directions, were not productive calculations. Conclusion: The Wedding Those who could not find a way to make comfortable sense of the mix had stayed away. Those of us who urge a critical relation to Dare and Lucy’s was no doubt one of many campaigns for state recognition of gay marriage weddings in Tasmania that summer that made do not, however, always consider the new forms their small contribution to the local tourist of resistance that will grow from the new industry (and to Peters of Kensington ). They regimes of regulation to which legally married were simultaneously part of a long sub-cultural gay and lesbian couples will be subjected. (One history, shaped by its post Stonewall and post of the many fascinating elements of the wedding Women’s Liberation inflections, and the industrial complex as narrated by Chrys harbingers of a new historical entity. Ingraham (1999) is the emergence of wedding industry consumer advocates in the late 1990s). My favourite story from the wedding came in its Resistance may be the most interesting aspect aftermath. A number of straight friends to whom of the history to come of ‘the respectable same I said ‘I officiated at a lesbian wedding over sex couple’. Following Valverde (2006) it may Christmas’ replied with ‘I didn’t know you were a also be fruitful to think more about how other wedding celebrant’. I am not and never have regimes of social and cultural life may shift as been. What was remarkable about these small the divide between hetero and homo sexuality as amnesias about the legal status of lesbian it has been solidified in marriage law, economics marriages and those authorised to conduct them

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was the performative power of my declaration, Butler, J. (1993). Imitation and gender and the marriage between Lucy and Dare to insubordination. In H.Abelove, M.A. Barale & which it testified, to create me as a wedding D. M. Halperin (Eds.), The lesbian and gay celebrant. I enjoyed the wedding and later being studies reader . New York: Routledge. mistaken for a (legally certified) wedding celebrant. I enjoyed the way my confused Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender . New York: listeners borrowed from the law yet without Routledge. paying interest on the loan. Cruz-Malave, A. & Manlansan, M, IV (2002). Acknowledgments Introduction:Dissident sexualities/alternative globalisms. In A Cruz-Malave & M. Manlansan Research for this article was supported by a Discovery IV (Eds.), Queer globalizations: Citizenship Project Grant from the Australian Research Council. and the afterlife of colonialism . New York: Acknowledgment is due to Jeska Rees and Ian Purcell New York University Press. for research assistance. Thanks to Lucy Sharman and Dare Kavanagh for permission to tell a story about Evans, D. (1993). Sexual citizenship: The their wedding. material construction of sexualities . London: Routledge. Author Note Ford, R. (1995). ‘Lady friends’ and ‘sexual Barbara Baird is an Associate Professor and deviationists’: Lesbians and law in Australia Head in the Department of Women’s Studies at 1920s-1950s’. In D. Kirkby (Ed.), Sex, power Flinders University in South Australia. Her and justice . Melbourne: Oxford University research addresses questions of sexual Press. citizenship and the cultural politics of sexuality and reproduction and focuses on the Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality : intersections between gender, sexuality, race Vol. 1. An introduction . Translated from the and nation. Contact: Department of Women’s French by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin. Studies, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Ganter, R. (1998). Living an immoral life – Adelaide South Australia 5001. ‘coloured’ women and the paternalistic state. [email protected]. Hecate , 24, 13-40.

References Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity . Durham: Duke University Press. Australian Marriage Equality. Retrieved 11 October 2007 from Haskins, V. & Maynard, J. (2005). Sex, race and http://www.australianmarriageequality.com/ power: Aboriginal men and white women in Australian history. Australian Historical Anonymous. (2007). Rudd: No to gay marriage, Studies , 36, 191-216. civil unions. Blaze , 17 August, 3. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Baird, B. (2005). ‘Kerryn and Jackie’: Thinking Commission. (2007_. Same-Sex: Same historically about lesbian marriages’. Australian entitlements . Sydney, HREOC. Historical Studies , 36, 253-271. Ingraham, C. (1999). White weddings. Baird, B. (2006). Sexual citizenship in ‘The New Romancing heterosexuality in popular culture . Tasmania’. Political Geography . 25. 964-987. New York: Routledge.

Brandzel, A. (2005). Queering citizenship? Jones, V. (2005) Just married . Big Eye Studios, Same-sex marriage and the state. GLQ , 11, Melbourne. 171-204. Karvelas, P. (2007). Telstra’s non-gender Brook, H. 1997. The troubled courtship of Gladys agenda. Australian , 26 September, 8. and Mick. Australian Journal of Political Science , 3, 420-440. Kunek, S. (1993). Brides, wives and single

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women: Gender and immigration. Lilith , 8, 82- 113.

Maddox, M. (2005). God under Howard : The rise of the religious right under Howard. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

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Mitchell, S. (2002). Kerryn and Jackie: The shared life of Kerryn Phelps and Jackie Stricker. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Moreton-Robinson, A. (2004). The possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty: The high court and the Yorta Yorta decision. Borderlands e-journal, 3. Retrieved 15 October, 2007, from http://wwww.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.ed u.au .

Nast, H. (2002). Queer patriarchies, queer racisms, international. Antipode, 34, 874-909.

Riggs, D.W. (2006). Priscilla, (white) queen of the desert: Queer rights/race privilege . New York: Peter Lang.

Seidman, S., Meeks, C. & Traschen, F. (1999). Beyond the closet? The changing social meaning of homosexuality in the United States. Sexualities , 2, 9-34.

Valverde, M. (2006). A new entity in the history of sexuality: The respectable same-sex couple. Feminist Studies , 32, 155-62.

Wheatley, K. (2006). SA Gay Activists Wed in Canada. Sunday Mail, July 30, 3.

Willett, G. (2000). Living out loud: A history of gay and lesbian activism in Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

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RECOGNITION FACTORS

ROSSLYN PROSSER

In thinking about Australia as the background to is no simple cause and effect. Love many, trust this story, I see it as a place unfolding, in the few, always paddle your own canoe is written on creases and in the understory. Whilst some of its the next page. What do they mean? Are they characteristics are known and accepted there telling the truth? Watch their eyes, their teeth, are many stories and interpretations of this the corners of the mouth, the truth will out. Not country. The lesbian is interested in the lesbian a drop, not an ounce, not a skerrick of truth. domestic archive as the place from which she Here I am telling stories, truthful stories. speaks. The story must be backed up with the validity of an archive, even if fictional. Never I drive across the landscape, it is a painting take anything for granted, nor at face value. It is pressed flat on the floor of the car. after all the construction of self that is at stake. A dot painting, I see it as if from the air, but There are many formations of lesbian and cannot sustain this viewing position. It is not domestic arrangements and to come to some mine. Directions dominated by roads, by signs. agreement on the archive will take some time, By pre-destined points. By maps previously for the argument will rest with you accepting the thought wise and the only possible ways of importance of the informal, the unlisted, the seeing landscape. Detours, streets between personal and the observed, rather than the filed blocks, urban sprawl. and the official, the archive that is. She reads Always something there, no clear spaces, more this archive because it quickly fades and is houses more cars, I drive across the landscape, shown little regard by the official machinery of urban and cluttered, the emptiness must be preservation. I ask you to de-nature your filled, the Indigenous replaced with deciduous, surroundings. To see the clothes you wear, the not one stone left unturned. So they think, so markings on your body, the haircut and the they think. shoes on your feet, as markers. As you wear these and enter into the house, the domestic Negotiating the everyday with the memory of sphere, which may be shared co-habiting the body in water, floating, now there’s a thing. couples or inhabited alone, of something outside Making stories that work to create a swoon. In of official discourses, ask yourself: how did you one sentence she creates that. You wish for it. get counted in the census this year? In this de- Writing that invests the everyday with body naturing you will see that you are making your memory. Pages that speak like lips against skin. archive as you live in this very moment, not in We watched our moon shadows in the still some future unknown and uninhabited. It is water, moon lit night. Calling back, dragging the accounting for the minutiae in the present that moon back into it’s phases, imagining that we makes the archive visible. In charting the had something to do with it. personal and the intimate what might the archive look like? Will it be filed away in some Appropriating as many myths as we could for future, perfect? The small stories told through our own understanding, seeing ourselves as fragments, poetry and interruptions. A collection intellectual owners of global knowledge, of signifying processes, novels, poems, understood intellectually but dispirited that we photographs, songs, and stories could show you could not quite enter the embodied space where what this particular archive looks like. But it dust, blood, ritual and thought inhabited the could come down to the use made of these occasion, where the myths ceased to explain the objects. Sometimes they are small acts of world. Now I explain the world through all of memory making, of soldering onto the daily, these stories and past meanings as if I have the another register, ‘I remember that day’, she said right to assemble them in that way, to take a looking at the photograph. Or Patti Smith portion of explanation and reconstruct them as singing: ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not my own. The everyday is often a place of mine’. uncertainty and trepidation, it feels at times as though I am constructed in the waves, In the autograph book of my childhood someone constantly changing, never the same. writes: 2YSUR2YSUBICUR2YS4ME. It’s plain to see, of Do lesbians inhabit this landscape? These course, to anyone who cares to look, that there spaces? Or as some suggest, is the landscape

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woman/female? Mother nature and all that, is it comfortable, never relaxed, not even for a female and always the other to machine? And moment. Do you or don’t you declare? Do you or how? Are they exempt from a colonial effect or don’t you pass? part of the complete story? Some would say so Do you or don’t you have your hair short, long, at times, inhabiting landscape and country with short butch, short femme, soft waves of curl, ideas of connection to the earth. number one and hard but fun. Do you or don’t you shave, here, there, legs, underarms, Body encased in metal, chrome, glass and fuel. moustache? Pluck: eyebrows, chin hair, It is not natural but I have become this moustache, what kind of woman are you movement, this combination of movements, anyway? Do you wait for the lesbian character clutch, gear, brake, accelerator, completely on television? Do you care, do you or don’t you naturalised. I barely think about it anymore. care? Have you told: your mother, does your Body comfortable in the seat, the technique of father know, what about your siblings, rest of driving and maneuvering second nature, second the family, friends, family, doctor? Are you a only to you. I drive across the landscape category, a statistic, absent from the census? watching the sway of grasses. Leaning sheds Are you breaking the law, which law is that? The and disappearing landmarks. The mud map you law of the father, oh yes, the law of the land made me is crushed into a small wad on the perhaps. Have you a tattoo across your back floor. I can no longer follow your direction. forehead? It is not hard to just write LESBIAN. It is as if I am digging and digging and never Or are you now - QUEER? It is not without a getting to what I’m looking for, as though the struggle, does it matter? I know how to perform red ribbon I’m following disappears into the dirt in such a way that my existence is not an and I can’t get to the end of it. affront.

You surround yourself with objects of direction, As a modern way of knowing the nation, the in display cabinets of accumulated reason; lesbian nation, such an idea was once an money spent, presents given, small objects, important part of being the politicised lesbian. glass ornaments, all for what? These are the What are the characteristics of the lesbian things of definition and meaning, dust collectors. citizens of lesbian nation? Is it wearing purple, What is dust? Is it pre-dirt? Through the wall I or is it being a drag king? This community is experience the shift in my body. I disappear into recognised by its initiates. It’s a walk, some say the tongue and groove and see myself lying swagger. A style. And then there is the outsider beside you. She takes your hand and kisses your who stays inside, the unrecognisable. Those you fingertips. Seeks you out against the kitchen would not know, who make their presence cupboards, up against the wall. Or is she your differently felt. All of the visible signs are missing girl all soft and feminine and pink? Waiting for but wouldn’t you know it, she has a dog. you in silence, words on the page, line after line Imagine a lesbian nation. I posit this only in of anticipation. remembrance of a dreamed possibility, before everything that exists now. Pauline Hanson puts In the private histories of the family, where lives this back on the map with her fears of an Asian collide and circumstance is created, femininity cyborg lesbian president. Why not, that would becomes a zone of contestation. What kind of be a healthy change? woman are you? In one she is simply fragmentary because evidence is the fragment, What is an Australian lesbian? In the display the corner piece of material left by the sewing case, the photo establishes that she is on the machine, once operated by hand, now machine. outside. She is memorialised now as her She cuts her hair short but keeps the heavy sexuality, not for any other reason do these ponytail, cut just above where it was gathered images have meaning. I look and look for by the rubber band. She puts the hair in a recognition, for affirmation. The photos don’t leather suitcase, a distinct memorial to times sing to me, I wish they would, they don’t pierce past. me, why not? The erotic of recognition passes and that is how she survives, calm and not On being dislocated, outside the sound of rain aroused by community. The lesbian archives are on a tin roof, breeze against weatherboard she real places in some cities. Here they are is filled with distinct possibilities, remaining imaginative and exist in an abstract way as a inside she is calling and whispering. Never memory archive – in this document it is the

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ways that language can be used in the everything, it is the butch cruising walk, jeans construction of a particular kind of subject, who slung low on hips, a tight-chested, Bonds t-shirt is seemingly outside of dominant history, outside walk. Or it is a beyond being lesbian walk, where of the official archive, an opening to possibilities, the definition is ridiculous, impossible, finished. not restricted to research and statistics. She is female masculinity, feminine voluptuousness, she is. It starts with a question. What is this place? I ride the love pony, caught in the love stirrup I A few friends, you see here is the photo memo. cannot, won’t, don’t know how to dismount. On the beach, in the restaurant, at the campsite, Love pony tilts and dies a wooden roundabout on the island naked. And at other times it is the death. You are my love pony. Love pony. Love. moment of remembering what a repressed and Love pony is the distant lesbian nation, a closet history can do. dreamed for place somewhere in New South It is the feminist symbol with a fist inside the Wales isn’t it? A name, a minor signifier: Amazon circle painted black on the back of a motorbike Acres. helmet. What does it mean to have lived like this? At the centre of the problem for some, for With your own codes and rules and ways of femininity, and might I say not just femininity, being. Not knowing how it all works, how it all but for the whole sexuality, space, belonging, fits together can make for confusion and delight. race, and class questions are the politics of love. Does it matter? It does if it can become part of No love. Pony. The pony grows old. Give to good the story, a small piece of being Australian. Who home, healthy old mare 14 hh. Suit companion are you, walking across the horizon? Shape horse or trail riding. distorted by the background, sun as it sinks, slow then fast, an orange ball distorted into the ‘Export Romance not Live Sheep’ appears ocean. alongside ‘Social Needs Before Private Profits’ on the stone wall across the road from the lesbian Who are you walking? I write of now and the feminist communal household, back then, back notion of the everyday lesbian. Inhabiting the then. ‘Women hold up half the sky’. shadows of the writing is a colonial past, a Is that the marker and the memorial? A history I seek to bring to the surface. In this memory? A memory archive. story of the post-colonial subject, the human At the core of me, of you? Some story of other post-colonial subject, the female post-colonial impacts, where is that Mills and Boon lesbian product of feminism and gay liberation and love affair. She stands outside of the cinema, environmentalism subject. Not all subjects are waiting for you to walk by. created this way. In attempting to spell out the problem of writing the lesbian body and a The archive is in all of these things, the particular archive I make a small corner of moments of cruising, of knowledge not remembrance. And here I find myself falling recorded, of informal trainings in love. The first back on some essential notion of the lesbian book you read, was it Ruby Fruit Jungle? Once body. Variously portrayed and recognised as when it was sex, not love-making and the paths shifting and situational, historically constructed, of emotional pain were greater than the sum of as lingering taste of secrecy and hatred, as their parts all the ponies released at once, passing and being feared, of fearing being gathering like brumbies at watering holes, frisky outed, of being thought of as non-existent, of and delighted. Write with champagne fingers chic now, and of male to female bodily re- along your neck, taking your ear in their mouth, orientation and becoming lesbian minus penis. all the women, all the women and some, more What then is the lesbian? The markers have like boys. We like them as boys, hard boned become distorted, possible to question identity definitions filling the space, button up is best but now, something strange in the fruit. then she shocks in her skirt or purple tutu. She has a tattoo ‘Steve’ on her right buttock and it’s Writing teachers in their wisdom say ‘write what not for a boy. The girl is catching flesh and lips, you know’. But you see I know as you do, in the counting the air between their bodies. template of knowledge, that this lesbian body is always negotiated and aware of the various How do they walk? They walk with an effort forms and structures and the range of made against femininity, a walk gives away possibilities open to it. For now, for this week, or

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month, or for today, I am the domestic surgeon of love, excising from the banal and the Her body on the back seat. Tattooed forearm, a mundane, the average weekly income, the cross and one word. structure of ‘Australian society’, the gold medal A name, a love. Her body works mine, you know sporting achievement, the preamble, the the clichés but do you know the way that she guarded apology, never one really, the ship works out, into the endorphin state, no stuck on the Barrier Reef, coral bleaching, this is chocolate as replacement here, stuck to the roof where I write from today. of your mouth as you fall asleep, cocoa sliding down the back of your throat. She slides, she Does this contribute to the lesbian body of makes wide, she coils, she springs, the desert knowledge? Through the attempt at placing hears her cries, night in the riverbed, moon on myself as a body structured in part through the horizon, smell of red gums. She works me, being lesbian, alongside all of the other points of she takes my hand and that is the end of me, identity, I am acknowledging that which is often it’s a shopping centre romance, it’s that ordinary absent but integral. This I part of how I know. and it’s that normal, an aisle awaits you, your Am I sounding like identity politics gone name is on the shelving, but you won’t find me berserk? Once I wrote that she is ordinary, there. however she drives a Toyota Hi-lux dual cab We dressed like men. Witnessing ourselves as with drop side tray wears Blundstones and an portrayal of a hardened place.Stretched across Akubra hat. She is ordinary, eating organic the desert lines of bitumen. Take you to here, vegetables, brown rice, tempeh and vegetables, take you to there, your soundtrack will be she is ordinary, no make up, no high heels. This distances covered, loads carried, sounds heard is the matter of the archive, sign of a different and repeated. While you drive singing to the kind of woman in this place. country.

We grew to be like men in this sun bright Author Note country, dressed like men, hard lines and short hair. A break, a shift, a movement away from Ros Prosser teaches in the Media Discipline at femininity, sad love song plays out on tinny the University of Adelaide. speakers of a car stereo and Gloria Gaynor sings ‘I will survive’. The scene, where you are now, describe the room. In the background you will hear land clearing in progress.

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THE HEGEMONIC AESTHETIC

SHAUN M. FILIAULT & MURRAY J.N. DRUMMOND

Abstract which disseminate ideals and knowledge. Accordingly, the marginalised classes come to A psycho-historical exploration of gay men’s see the ruling group’s domination as ‘natural’, body image in the late 20 th and early 21 st and believe in the natural right of the upper centuries is a story of change. As demonstrated class to wield power. Donaldson (1993, p. 645) in academic narratives of idealised bodies in summarises hegemony by saying it “involves those periods, and demonstrated in the popular persuasion of the greater part of the population, art of those times, the ‘perfect’ gay body of the particularly through the media, and the 1960s to 1980s is strikingly different from the organisation of social institutions in ways that body many young gay men of the late 1990s appear ‘natural’, ‘ordinary’, ‘normal’”. Through and early 2000s find most attractive. Moreover, this persuasion of the lower classes as to the this shift has had implications across sexual upper class’ natural right to rule, marginalised orientations. While the gay ideal of the 1970s segments of society actually become complicit in might be best described as a ‘straight body’ the their own marginalisation by believing there is ideal straight body of today may actually no other way. Hegemony thus imposes power coincide with the new gay ideal. without the use of brute force.

Stemming from Connell’s (1995) application of Although Gramsci’s model was originally used to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, and a model economic class (and has accordingly sensibility toward the queerness inherent to influenced neo-Marxist ideology), Connell (1992; discussions of bodies and sex, this article will 1995) extended the theory to interpret gender examine the concept of body image and its relations. She suggests that at any one time historical shift across time and sexual multiple masculinities are in competition with orientations. Ultimately, we hope to demonstrate one another, but only one is held in highest that a body type can become hegemonic in a regard, and that dominant position is given historical moment, as witnessed by that discursively enabled by reference to ‘nature’. At body type’s prevalence in both actual persons the time of Connell’s writing, and the publication and in art. We call this hegemony of body image of a plethora of subsequent analyses and the ‘hegemonic aesthetic’ of the period. critiques, the dominant form of masculinity within Western society included a number of Hegemonic Masculinity: Homophobia mental characteristics. These traits included in Hard Bodies mental resiliency and stoicism, control of one’s self and others, a lack of concern for Masculinity, and, in particular, the notion of appearances, daring and risk taking, as well as aggression (Connell, 1995; Donaldson, 1993; multiple ‘masculinities’, has emerged as an area 1 of increased research attention over the past Kimmel, 1994). twenty years. Though a number of accounts of masculinity exist, Connell’s (1995) “hegemonic Central to the mental attributes of the described masculinity” has become one of the most hegemonic masculinity is a repudiation of commonly used in the academic press. femininity. Indeed, this form of masculinity may be thought of as a flight from being seen as The concept of hegemonic masculinity draws feminine and a constant struggle for a man to upon and extends Gramsci’s notion of re-enforce and constantly demonstrate his hegemony. Simply put, hegemony theory rejection of femininity (Kimmel, 1994; Curry, suggests that within any power system, one 1991). This rejection is accomplished in two class of individuals will be held in highest regard fashions. One such method is the sexual and, accordingly, wield power and control. The capacity for the dominant class to maintain 1 It may also be the case that hegemonic masculinity control is enabled by that group’s ability to depends on a number of demographic traits, such as dictate the terms and ideals by which lower race and age. However, less research has been classes interpret power and the broader world. conducted in those areas than on sexual orientation and the body, signaling an important gap in the This dominance is accomplished by controlling current state of research knowledge surrounding the social institutions, particularly the media, hegemony and masculinity. ISSN 1833-4512 © 2007 Author and Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Interest Group of the Australian Psychological Society.

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objectification of women, and the attitude that right attitude and the right ‘look’ have access to women exist solely for men’s erotic pleasure power. Those men who are found to be lacking (Donaldson, 1993; Pharr, 1988). in either dimension are therefore thought to be marginalised. If that preposition is accurate, The other method by which men who occupy then it should be that some men – those in hegemonic positions can demonstrate their lack power – are hegemonic in that they have both of femininity is through homophobia (Curry, the look and the attitude. 1991; Donaldson, 1993; Lehne, 1998; Pharr, 1988). Kimmel (1994) asserts “homoerotic Yet, it appears as though few men, in lived desire is cast as feminine desire, desire for other experience, actually possess the right men. Homophobia is the effort to suppress that combination of attitude and aesthetic so as to be desire, to purify all relationships with other men, considered hegemonic. Indeed, Donaldson with women, with children of its taint, and to (1993) and Kimmel (1994) both question if any ensure that no one could possibly ever mistake men actually possess the special combination one for a homosexual” (p. 130). Through the indicative of hegemonic masculinity. This reality inclusion of homophobia as integral to of hegemonic masculinity proves problematic hegemonic masculinity, a gay masculinity is from a variety of standpoints. From a practical established as a marginalised form of perspective, the utility of a social theory that masculinity, and gay men are a priori excluded describes the social reality of, potentially, from the hegemony. Indeed, Donaldson (1993) nobody, seems futile. Moreover, the seeming Kimmel (1993) and Lehne (1998) all assert that inability of hegemonic masculinity to describe homophobia is the defining characteristic of a the lives of real men is awkward from a hegemonically masculine man. phenomenological vantage point.

In addition to the attitudinal – and especially Phenomenology is the study of lived homophobic – basis of hegemonic masculinity, experiences. It seeks to understand the essence various somatic characteristics also factor into a of meaning people make of their lives, so as to man’s embodiment of the hegemonic ideals. understand what their lives are like (Seidman, Indeed, Connell (1995) asserts the body is an 1998). Accordingly, from a phenomenological integral part of the masculine hegemony. A perspective, good social theory should attempt growing research literature demonstrates that to capture the lived experience of individuals. If, Western men perceive a large, muscular body as however, Donaldson and Kimmel are right, and being emblematic of masculinity (Bordo, 1999; no men fully exhibit the complete collection of Drummond, 2002; Grogan & Richards, 2002). hegemonic traits, then it may be the case, at Drummond (1996) suggests that men are least for phenomenological researchers, that culturally expected to be muscular and have hegemonic masculinity, as an umbrella concept, bodies that occupy space. Not surprisingly, then, should be deconstructed to components that many men express a desire to be more muscular actually do reflect the essence of individuals’ (e.g. Thompson & Cafri, 2007) a trend coined experiences. “The Adonis Complex” (Pope, Phillips, & Olivardia, 2000). Thus, hegemonic masculinity, The most obvious way to deconstruct hegemonic as envisioned by Connell, includes both attitude masculinity may be to break it down to its two and somatotype. Possession of both the right component parts described above: attitude and frame of mind, and the right body, enables a somatotype. A man may gain prestige and man to access power and privilege. Lack of power by exhibiting either the right kind of either trait subsequently places the man in a attitudes – namely, a stoic homophobia marginalised position, without access to power, (however paradoxical that may seem), or by and without a privileged position within the having the right kind of body – big, hard, and society. muscular. Thus, there is both a hegemonic attitude and a hegemonic somatotype. Hegemonic Masculinity and the (Queer) Phenomenology of Men: This de-construction of hegemonic masculinity is Toward the Hegemonic Aesthetic essentially queer in nature, with particular relevance to Ahmed’s (2006; 2007) concept of Based on Connell’s notion of hegemonic ‘queer phenomenology’. To borrow from masculinity, only men who possess both the Ahmed’s lexicon, if we consider the hegemonic 176

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attitude and the hegemonic somatotype as ‘lines’ in that it must be mesomorphic to be on which one navigates gender, body, and hegemonic. But on top of that mesomorphic sexuality, then hegemonic masculinity is the build is inscribed the social attribute of power special case (or non-existent case) when the and control that comes from being hegemonic. hegemonic attitude and hegemonic somatotype It is when meaning is traced on to a body, due overlap – that is, both the stoic, misogynistic to the body’s build, that somatotype becomes an homophobia of the attitude, and the bulky aesthetic. From this it may be suggested that muscularity of the somatotype are present in the there exists a hegemonic aesthetic, and it is same person. In contrast, it is possible that a described as being big and muscular (e.g. person’s life ‘line’ may not be congruent with the Drummond, 1996, 2002; Grogan & Richards, hegemonic attitude, but still in line with the 2002). hegemonic aesthetic. Thus, on the surface, an individual may appear to be in accord with Exampling the Hegemonic Aesthetic hegemonic masculinity, when, in reality, he is not. It is these instances when lines that are Donaldson (1993) notes that a critical aspect to supposed to travel in the same direction actually a hegemony is that its ideal type should be veer from each other that a situation is rendered glorified in media, and demonstrated as superior queer. to marginalised groups in that media. Therefore, if a hegemonic aesthetic exists, it should be This deconstruction of hegemonic masculinity, exampled in media. For a demonstration of a via the hegemonic somatotype, and the essential hegemonic aesthetic, three traits should be queerness of that distinction, is critical for the evident in that media: (1) a male body type is study of men’s lives and men’s body image. idealised; (2) if other body types are presented Much research on male body image has in the media, they are marginalised; (3) assumed a 1-to-1 relationship between body aesthetic and attitude do not necessarily need to type and one’s construction of gender and overlap, but those with the correct attitude or sexuality (e.g. Andersen, Cohn, & Holbrook, aesthetic are demonstrated as being powerful. 2000). In other words, it has mistakenly assumed that the hegemonic attitude always A particularly potent form of media that can be lines up with the hegemonic somatotype, and used in such an investigation are comics, accordingly, has not allowed room for the queer. drawings, and cartoons. Indeed, Padva (2005) Within the realm of a phenomenological analysis argues those texts, including erotic comics, can of body image, this de-queering of body image, be useful in discerning social values and via the meshing of attitude and somatotype, attitudes, as “erotic gay comic strips are essentially flattens the phenomenological concerned with a wide spectrum of social, meaning of the body to the individual by not cultural, and political issues” (p. 588, emphasis leaving room for an appreciation of the moments in original). Padva also asserts that comics are when lines go astray. It is, as suggested above, ideal for examining true fantasies and ideals, as a phenomenologically flawed concept. they are not bound by physical reality. That facet of comics is particularly important for an Therefore, we suggest that an examination of investigation of ideal bodies: If an artist’s pen, men’s lives and men’s bodies may be best and not physiology, is the limit, then in what studied under the rubric of a hegemonic manner will an ideal body be portrayed? What is masculinity that recognises how power and the nature of our somatic ideal? Comics can privilege can be attained not only in the special provide the answers to those questions. case of lines overlapping, but in the more tangible cases in which one navigates the line In addition to using media to demonstrate the either of attitude or somatotype successfully. In concept of a hegemonic aesthetic, that sense, the word somatotype may not even phenomenology would argue that the break be the most accurate term to describe this between aesthetic and attitude needs to be concept. From anthropometry, somatotype present in the lives of individuals. Therefore, refers simply to the ratio of an individual’s body accounts of men’s lives must also demonstrate measurements. It is a rather medical term. not only an idealised body type, but the break Instead, the word aesthetic may be more useful, between aesthetic and attitude. as an aesthetic can be thought of as a body with meaning. Certainly, the somatotype is important, 177

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Given the centrality of the media in (‘hung’) were put on a pedestal. This sense of evidencing/supporting a hegemony, and the raw masculinitiy was demonstrated not only in unique nature of comics in representing bodies, the body, but in how these men adorned their we now examine two sets of comics from two body. Cole (2000) describes Clone fashion as epochs of contemporary gay history: Those of reflecting a working class, rugged, masculine Tom of Finland and those of Joe Phillips. In so sensibility. Denim, leather, flannel and work doing, we will attempt to address the three books were the vogue; further, clothing was aspects of the hegemonic aesthetic that should tight fitting so as to accentuate the (hopefully be present in media. Furthermore, we hope to muscular and hung) body beneath. demonstrate the existence of a hegemonic aesthetic, and its lack of connection to attitude, Clones in Pop Culture in the lives of men. While the Clones were on the dance floors of the Circuit Clones 1970s, the artwork of Tom of Finland would likely have been on the coffee tables of these The Macho Man Look men. ‘Tom’ was a Finnish cartoonist whose artwork openly depicted homosexuality and As suggested earlier, an historical shift can be men’s bodies; his work featured men enjoying noted in the idealised gay bodies of the 1960s to their sexuality and the bodies of other men. In those revered today, and this dichotomy is that sense, Tom’s canon of work was evident both in academic narratives and in gay groundbreaking as it was some of the first overt, erotic comics from both periods. positive imagery of male homosexuality post- Stonewall. In the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in post- Stonewall United States, the ‘gay ghettos’ of Tom of Finland’s work depicts the Clone look. many major cities began to flourish, with the Accordingly, as suggested above, the erotic creation of extensive circles of cafes, bookshops, cartoons of an era demonstrate the ideal body of night clubs, bars, and sex clubs available for gay that time. Furthermore, the cartoons represent men to frequent, collectively called ‘The Circuit’ fantastic (that is, of fantasy) Clone bodies. The (Levine, 1997; Marcus, 2002; Scagliotti, 1999; men in his cartoons are hyper-muscular, have Tattleman, 2005). massive pelvic bulges, wear working class clothes (at least, when they are wearing their Appearances mattered in gaining entry to Circuit clothes), and demonstrate a raw, rough sense of locales; failure to look the right way would result sexuality. in denied entry (Tattleman, 2005). Therefore, access to gay sex depended upon achieving and maintaining the proper ‘look’; that is, achievement of the ‘ideal body’ for this sub- Figure 1 culture served as an entry mechanism to the spaces and places of the Circuit. Indeed, this specific look was so ubiquitous as to become known as ’The Clone’ (Levine, 1997; Levine & Kimmel, 1998; Cole, 2000). Specifically, Clone men needed to look masculine and play up their masculinity and appear butch (Cole, 2000; Levine, 1997; Tattleman, 2005)

Central to the Clone look and masculine appearance was a mesomorphic body type, with V-shaped torso with noticeable pectoral muscles and defined arms (Levine, 1997; Levine & Kimmel, 1998; Tattleman, 2005). Body hair was accepted, and indeed expected as part of this look – a fuzzy chest, abdominal muscles, and facial hair were the look du jour. Likewise, penis Figure 1 size was emphasised, as men with large genitals 178

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Figure 1 depicts one of Tom of Finland’s within the attitudinal portion of hegemonic cartoons.2 These men are Clones. In the comic masculinity, homophobia and misogyny are the men are drawn as extremely muscular, with inextricably linked (Kimmel, 1993; Pharr, 1988). large shoulders, enormous arms, toned pecs, Even if Clones held negative views of women, and big biceps. In that sense, these men are the Clones still could not access full hegemonic emblematic of the ideal body type described in masculinity because gay men, by definition, are the academic literature: large, muscular, and excluded from hegemonic masculinity, especially taking up space. Furthermore, there is a sense since homophobia is the watermark of of power evident in this comic, as demonstrated hegemonically masculine attitudes. No matter not only by the men groping one of the other what their attitude, Clones could not access men, but also by the fact that only Clones are hegemonic power via attitudes due to their shown at this bar. Those without the right body sexuality. were, presumably, denied access. In having the right body, the Clones are able to access gay sex These men could, however, access power via and control the gay scene. their bodies. Indeed, Cole (2000) Levine (1997), and Tattleman (1995) all suggest Clones’ hyper- A superficial interpretation of this comic would muscular body types were an attempt to look suggest a gay complicity with hegemonic masculine. In other words, the Clones had an masculinity. These images celebrate male appreciation that if their bodies appeared the strength and muscularity, un-restrained sexual right way, they may still be able to access the prowess, body hair, and working class symbols power and privilege of masculinity, even though such as work boots. If it were a woman that was they were gay. If nothing else, this desire to being groped in figure one, it may be argued appear the right way, even in the absence of the that Tom of Finland’s cartoons are right attitude, suggests power may be attained representative of ‘full’ or ‘mainstream’ through having the hegemonic aesthetic of a hegemonic masculinity. Yet, what is troublesome given period. for the hegemony is that it is a man whose backside is being pinched. These men, who on Rise of the Twinks the surface seem in accord with the tenets of the hegemonic masculinity, are gay, and thus Since the 1980s, the ideal gay body has moved simultaneously in contrast with the hegemony at on from the Clones. Levine (1997) and Cole the same time they are upholding it. (2000) attribute this change to the impact of Remembering that these images are reflective of HIV and AIDS on Western gay society. Simply, the actual gender/sexual milieu of many gay not only did many Clone men fall ill, but the men of the period, it becomes evident that a appearance of a Clone was associated with number of gay men lived in a manner teetering illness itself. Not surprisingly then, the Clone between hegemony and anti-hegemony by appearance lost its appeal within the gay world meshing the exalted hegemonic masculinity with as those who were Clones were no longer on the the marginalised gay masculinity. In that sense, scene, and younger generations were tentative the Clones represent a queer challenge to to emulate a body type that was seen as hegemonic masculinity by meshing the aesthetic indicative of illness. Quite simply, the Clone look aspects of hegemonic masculinity with man-on- lost its appeal. More so, through illness, the man sex. That challenge is overcome, however, Clones lost whatever power they may have had if we are to suggest that these men’s bodies within the gay world. were hegemonic, and, therefore, powerful, while their attitudes, through same-sex sex, were By the late 1990s and early 2000s, a new body marginalised. type was idealised by Western gay men. In qualitative interviews with young gay men It may be argued, as does Bersani (1983), that Drummond (2005) and Bergling (2007) found despite having gay erotic attractions, Clones that a thin, yet slightly muscled body type was were still misogynistic, and therefore emblematic revered; those findings are supported by of what is now termed hegemonic masculinity. quantitative research (Yelland & Tiggemann, That stance, however, elides the point that 2004). Further, a smooth body, with little to no body hair, is thought to be most attractive (Bergling, 2007; Drummond, 2005) and the 2 Images are courtesy of the Tom of Finland importance of penis size is less explicit for Foundation, www.tomoffinlandfoundation.org 179

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younger gay men (Drummond & Filiault, 2007). male body. The Twink image hence represents a The importance of clothing has shifted, from the clean break from their Clone forefathers. working class sensibility of the Clones, to a high fashion sensibility of the Twinks, who tend to be ‘label conscious’. Furthermore, youth is emphasised in this context, as aging is seen to not only be related to the deterioration of the body, but perhaps also with the HIV epidemic itself (Berling, 2007; Drummond, 2006; Levine, 1997). In sum, this new, youthful, smooth, toned gay male was termed the ‘Twink’ look. In a sense, Twinks are the contemporary counterpart of the Clones, in that the Twink look is omni-present within many Westernised gay social circles.

Joe Bois

Just as Tom of Finland captured the Clone look within his art, Joe Phillips has done the same for the Twinks. Phillips is a California-based cartoonist whose colorful, playful rendering of contemporary gay life has made his cartoons – often referred to as ‘Joe Bois’ – iconic within mainstream gay culture.

Figure 2 (below) depicts one of Phillip’s comics and, simultaneously, the Twink body. 3 The Figure 2 young man in the comic has clear muscular definition and little noticeable body fat, clearly This break, and indeed seeming outright embodying the gay somatic ideals described in rejection, is made evident in figure 3 (below), the interviews conducted by Drummond (2005) which is the final panel of one of Phillip’s comics and Bergling (2007). While the Clone image also entitled ‘emale’. In the cartoon, the two young placed importance on muscularity, there is a men set up blind dates online; they agree to discernable difference between the level of wear a black tank top in one case, and a white t- musculature depicted in figure 1 and that in shirt with a blue overshirt in the other case. The figure 2. In figure 1, the level of musculature is two men arrive, and meet each other, before bulging, with massive shoulders, biceps, and realising that they are not each other’s dates – it pectoral muscles; the entire physique suggests is merely a coincidence they are in the right use of supplements or steroids. By contrast, the clothing. Instead, their dates are the older men musculature of figure 2, while certainly present, in the window: a hairy, muscular individual in is not as defined as the Clone image; it may be black, and a chubby man in blue. The two better termed as ‘toned’ than ‘bulging’. It is a younger men see their correct dates, and find subdued muscularity, indicative more of a more interest in each other, and while they swimmer’s type of body than a weight lifter’s recognise their body-based rejection is ‘shallow’, physique. Keeping in mind that comics represent that shallowness is acceptable to them. Their the limits of fantasy, it becomes apparent that rejection of the two men in the window is a while the Clone image desired an over-the-top symbolic rejection of not only age, but also of level of muscularity, the Twink image idealises a the hyper-muscular, hairy bodies of Clones, and much smaller frame. In that sense, the idealised the rotund bodies of those with excess body fat. masculine form for contemporary gay men Instead, there is only one sort of acceptable features a still-muscular, though not massive, body in the contemporary Twink world: Young, toned, and smooth. Such bodies are hegemonic; all others are marginalised, and the object of Twink ridicule and laughter. 3 Images used with permission from Joe Phillips, and accessed from www.joephillips.com 180

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with body fat was related to dampened self esteem. Those findings were groundbreaking, in that they challenged the traditional notion that straight men simply desire large muscular bodies. Other recent publications (Frederick, et al., 2007) have corroborated Filiault’s findings, as undergraduate men routinely expressed a desire for a thinner body, as assessed by the Fat Silhouette Measure (FSM). Thus, not only have different research teams found a male desire for thinness, but those similar findings were attained using different instrumentation. Clearly, times are changing in terms of both heterosexual and gay men’s body image.

These findings lead to a truly ironic, and strikingly queer conclusion: Ideal body image has reversed. The Clones of decades past emulated a ‘straight’ body image by idealising large, muscular bodies that occupied space. It was a hegemonic way of being gay, ‘a very straight gay’ to use Connell’s (1992, 1995) terminology. By contrast, straight men of today seem to be turning in the direction of the Twink, by desiring muscular, yet thin bodies. If the Clones were a ‘straight gay’, we would argue that contemporary straight men are going in the

opposite direction - ‘a very gay straight’ - Figure 3 through their emulation of the Twink body type. Moreover, this aesthetic is gaining power within Straight Joe Bois? the straight world. Football players – traditionally the archetype of masculinity – are demonstrating a break from the hegemonic The Twink image, as demonstrated both through interviews (Bergling, 2007; Drummond, 2005; masculinity described by Connell, as evidenced Drummond & Filiault, 2007) and the exposition by stars like Beckham (Cashmore & Parker, above, emphasises muscle, but it also 2003), Henson (Harris & Clayton, 2007) and emphasises thinness. Indeed, none of the Joe Ljungberg (Coad, 2005) who espouse a toned, Bois are large men, as was the case for the smooth, fashion-conscious aesthetics. Clones. Furthermore, articles in the popular (Hill, 2003) and academic (Olivardia, Pope, Borowiecki, &

Traditionally, straight men’s body image Cohane, 2004) presses suggest many heterosexual women are finding this toned, coincided more with the Clone image than the Twink image. Past research (Pope, Phillips & smooth male body type as being more sexually Olivardia, 2000; Thompson & Cafri, 2007) has attractive than an overly-muscled man. demonstrated straight men traditionally are concerned with overall muscle mass, and desire Implications of A Very Gay Straight: A large, muscular bodies that occupy space New Hegemonic Aesthetic (Drummond, 1996). Thinness was not a concern commonly mentioned by straight men, and Within contemporary gay culture, embodying the muscle was seen as the normative discontent Twink aesthetic is viewed as important for within that community. Recent research accessing gay clubs and being accepted within challenges that notion. In quantitative work with many gay social networks. Social isolation awaits straight men, using the Somatomorphic Matrix those who do not maintain the look (Atkins, (Filiault, 2007), results demonstrated not only a 1997; Bergling, 2007; Dotson, 1999). Similarly, sizable number of men who wished they were the Twink aesthetic has gained in-roads with thinner, regardless of BMI, but that discontent many straight men, as powerfully exampled by 181

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Beckham, Henson, and Ljungberg. Accordingly, South Australia. Electronic mail: it can be argued that within gay culture the [email protected] Twink look has come into a position of power, and is hegemonic; the body expectations for Murray J.N. Drummond is a senior lecturer in the straight men does not seem far behind. The School of Health Sciences at the University of Twink body is the hegemonic aesthetic for many South Australia. gay men, and increasing numbers of straight men. References

Yet, there is little evidence for a change in Ahmed, S. (2006). Orientations: Toward a queer hegemonic attitudes, such as strength, stoicism, phenomenology. GLQ, 12 , 543-574. misogyny, and homophobia within most straight men (c.f. Anderson, 2004). Accordingly, another Ahmed, S. (2007). Queer phenomenology: mis-match is occurring. In the same vein that Orientations, objects, others . Durham, NC: the Clones emulated the hegemonic aesthetic, Duke University Press. but not the hegemonic attitude, contemporary straight men may be emulating the new Andersen, A., Cohn, L. & Holbrook, T. (2000). hegemonic (Twink) aesthetic, without Making weight: Men’s conflicts with food, concomitant changes in the old hegemonic weight, shape, and appearance . Carlsbad, CA: attitude. A disconnect exists between body and Gurze Books. behavior, and this disconnect is not one that can be adequately discussed or theorised under the Anderson, E.D. (2004). Masculine identities of umbrella of hegemonic masculinity, without male nurses and cheerleaders: Declining making changes to that concept. homophobia and the emergence of inclusive masculinity. [unpublished doctoral Connell (1995) notes that hegemonic masculinity dissertation]. Irvine: University of California. evolves in response to new social ideals and situations; that which was hegemonic in Atkins, D. (ed.) (1998). Looking queer: Body generations past may fall behind a new image and identity in lesbian, bisexual, gay, hegemonic ideal. If we break hegemonic and transgender communities. New York: masculinity into two components, attitude and Harrington Park Press. aesthetic, then the same may be true. Historical shifts can change the aesthetics that are Bergling, T. (2007). Chasing Adonis : Gay men hegemonic, without changing the attitudes, and and the pursuit of perfection . New York: vice versa. As demonstrated, an historical Harrington Park Press. change has occurred in regard to the body – from Clone to Twink – though attitudes remain Bordo, S. (1999). The male body: A new look at largely the same. men in public and private . New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Truly, then, in heterosexual men appearing as ‘a very gay straight’ we are reminded that the Cashmore, E. & Parker, A. (2003). One David phenomenological lines we navigate are not Beckham: Celebrity, masculinity, and the always easy to discern. Appearance and soccerati. Sociology of Sport Journal , 20, 214. behavior are separate lines, and should be not be conflated with one another. It is only through Coad, D. (2005). Euro 2004 and football fashion. this separate consideration of lives and lines that Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 29 , 124- the essential queerness of gender, sexuality, and 126. the body is able to be recognised, and the phenomenological complexity of those entities is Cole, S. (2000). ‘ Don we now our gay apparel’: truly appreciated on its own terms. Gay men’s dress in the twentieth century . New York: Berg. Author Note Connell, R.W. (1992). A very gay straight: Shaun M. Filiault is a doctoral candidate in the Masculinity, homosexual experience, and the School of Health Sciences at the University of dynamics of gender. American Sociological Review, 57, 735-751. 182

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Donaldson, M. (1993). What is hegemonic Lehne, G.K. (1998). Homophobia among men: masculinity? Theory and Society, 22 , 643-657. Supporting and defining the male role. In M.S. Kimmel & M.A. Messner, (Eds.) Men’s lives, 4 th Dotson, E.W. (1999). Behold the man: The hype Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. and selling of male beauty in media and culture. Albany: Harrington Park Press. Levine, M.P. (1998). The life and death of gay clones. In M.S. Kimmel & M.A Messner (Eds.) Drummond, M. (1996). The social construction Men’s lives . Boston: Allyn and Bacon. of masculinity as it relates to sport: An investigation into the lives of elite level Levine, M.P. & Kimmel, M.S. (1998). Gay macho: athletes competitng in individually-oriented The life and death of the homosexual clone. masculinised sports. [Unpublished doctoral New York: New York University Press. dissertation]. Perth: Edith Cowen University. Marcus, E. (2002). Making gay history: The half- Drummond, M.J.N. (2002). Men, body image, century fight for lesbian and gay equal rights . and eating disorders. International Journal of New York: Perennial. Men’s Health , 1, 89-103. Olivardia, R., Pope, H.G., Borowiecki, J.J., & Drummond, M.J.N. (2005). Men’s bodies: Cohane, G.H. (2004). Biceps and body image: Listening to the voices of young gay men. Men The relationship between muscularity and and Masculinities, 7, 270-290. self-esteem, depression, and eating disorder symptoms. Psychology of Men and Masculinity, Drummond, M.J.N. (2006). Ageing gay men’s 5, 112-120. bodies. Gay & Lesbian Issues in Psychology Review, 2, 60-66. Pavda, G. (2005). Dreamboys, meatmen, and werewolves: Visualizing erotic identities in all- Drummond, M.J.N. & Filiault, S.M. (2007). The male comic strips. Sexualities, 8 , 587-599. long and the short of it: Gay men’s perceptions of penis size. Gay and Lesbian Pharr, S. (1988). Homophobia: A weapon of Issues and Psychology Review, 3 , 121-129. sexism. Iverness, CA: Chardon Pres.

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PSYCHOLOGY, LIBERALISM, AND ACTIVISM: CHALLENGING DISCOURSES OF ‘EQUALITY WITH’ IN THE SAME-SEX MARRIAGE DEBATE

DAMIEN W. RIGGS

Abstract acontextual approach to psychological research means on the whole that psychology is Current activism within the discipline of inherently unable to explore political issues, psychology, particularly with regard to the same- other than through an individualised lens. sex marriage debate, has at times been limited by the reliance upon liberal individualism. More In regards to the view of psychology held by specifically, the liberal assumption of ‘equality Kitzinger and Perkins (1993), it is important to with’ may be seen to produce a number of clarify that there are of course a wide range of negative outcomes that result from a focus upon psychological approaches that are indeed critical singular axes of identity. In contrast to an of mainstream psychology’s focus on the understanding of activism that focuses on individual (these include critical psychology: Fox equality, this paper provides an examination of & Prilleltensky, 1997, community psychology: the American Psychological Association’s Watts & Serrano-GarcÍa, 2003, and feminist resolution on same-sex marriage, and proposes psychology: Burman, 1998). Kitzinger and that activists (both within the discipline and Perkins focus specifically on how psychology has beyond) may benefit from engaging in analyses often been complicit with the oppression of of how state sanction serves to ‘domesticate’ lesbians. My focus within this paper takes their same-sex attracted individuals. By elaborating critique as a starting place, but offers a more the notion of ‘state moral minimalism’, it is optimistic view of psychology’s role in activism proposed that future resolutions may move or advocacy (as does Kitzinger in her more away from a simplistic reliance upon the concept recent work, such as Wilkinson & Kitzinger, of ‘equality’, and may instead move towards an 2005). My aim is therefore not to paint a view of acknowledgment of the multiple ways in which psychology that ignores the vast differences that oppression and privilege intersect. exist within the discipline, but rather to draw attention to the limitations that arise from Introduction employing an individualised approach to activism within the discipline of psychology, and the The discipline of psychology has two quite attendant problems that result from focusing distinct, and indeed paradoxical histories. The primarily on single-issue identity politics. In first history tells of a discipline “that would make other words, I seek to question some of the a difference”: that would not only “describe implications that might arise from the two reality but [also] change it, and for the better” competing understandings of the discipline of (Bradley & Selby, 2001, p. 84). The second psychology as described above, and to history is of a discipline that “always serves to investigate how the discipline of psychology on obscure larger social and political issues (sexism, the whole is both a part of, and potentially an heterosexism, racism, classism), converting effective counter to, the ways in which them into individual pathologies by an insistent individualisation can negatively impact upon focus on the personal” (Kitzinger & Perkins, particular marginalised groups. In order to do 1993, p. 6). In regards to the first history, so, I focus on the example of same-sex Bradley and Selby suggest that psychology was marriage, and explore the ways in which originally conceived as a means to promoting debates over marriage rights have been taken social welfare, one that would necessarily start up by the American Psychological Association from a critique of the status quo. They propose (APA). that in moving away from these aims, the discipline at large has failed to take account of At the same time as I seek to explore the issues how individual oppression occurs in a broader that may arise from any use of an individualised social context. This point also informs Kitzinger approach to activism in regards to same-sex and Perkins’ critique of the discipline. They marriage rights, I also wish to examine how the propose that the shift towards an individualised, promotion of such rights within the framework 3 ISSN 1833-4512 © 2007 Author and Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Interest Group of the Australian Psychological Society

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of identity politics can work to further exclude or existing legal, political and social frameworks, oppress certain groups of people. By examining rather than necessarily changing such the racialised and sexualised assumptions that frameworks themselves (Fox & Prilleltensky, frame both the discipline of psychology and the 1997; Wright, 2001). What this approach to claims of those who advocate for marriage activism fails to recognise, however, is that rights, I seek to demonstrate how efforts to gain within societies where racialised and sexualised sanction within the law and through the state differences (amongst others) are foundational to may only serve to further marginalise certain rights, equality can only ever refer to ‘equality groups of people. In this sense, I explore the with’ (Riggs, 2004). In other words, liberal limitations of activism as it is often configured notions of equality are always implicitly about within the context of liberalism, and I thus oppressed or marginalised groups gaining question whose purposes are served by equality with the dominant group. As a result, enshrining the rights of particular same-sex equality remains defined on the terms of the attracted individuals within the law. dominant group, thus promoting assimilation as the best way to gaining rights, rather than As a response to the critiques that I provide of representing a challenge to the values that individualism and identity politics, I explore one predominate in Western societies (Hage, 1998). possible avenue for activism within the discipline Of course, ‘equality with’ may indeed be an of psychology. Drawing on the notion of ‘state important goal for activism, as many groups of moral minimalism’ (Halle, 2001), and Fox (1985; people living in Western nations continue to 1993) and Butler’s (2002) work on legal experience extreme hardship as a result of sanction, I propose that activists may benefit unequal social relations. Yet at the same time it from considering approaches that seek to is important to further explore this point about challenge the status of the law as the site of ‘equality with’, and the implications for this recognition, and to explore some possible approach in regards to activism within the approaches for securing legal recognition that discipline of psychology. may not necessarily be dependent upon the forms of recognition currently afforded to same- One particular place where we may see sex attracted individuals. examples of this discourse of ‘equality with’ is in the APA’s resolution on same-sex marriage. It is Liberalism and ‘Equality With’ of course important to clarify here that the resolution was aimed at achieving particular As Bradley and Selby (2001) suggest, the goals: it was intended as a counter to the discipline of psychology was founded in part (then) proposed Defence of Marriage Act, and as upon a desire to challenge oppression. Whilst such was written in accordance with both the this may have historically been the case, and legal context by which it was framed, and as a whilst organisations such as the American means to informing members of the APA more Psychological Association (APA) and the broadly as to the importance of speaking out on Australian Psychological Society continue to this issue. However, whilst these points are engage in social action (e.g., in the form of important, my focus in this paper is on how the press releases in support of minority group liberal framework of mainstream psychology (as rights) and advocacy (e.g., within courtrooms it is represented at its broadest in the US by the and at legislative hearings), such actions are APA) can work to promote the notion that what typically done within a framework of liberalism is required in regards to heterosexism in the US (Terry, 1999). is for lesbians and gay men to gain equality with heterosexual men and women. Thus whilst it A liberal framework is most often one that may be suggested that the APA resolution could presupposes that ‘equality for all’ is both a never have been a forum within which to possible and desirable goal. Liberalism is thus critique notions of equality, I do believe that it about promoting a vision of human rights that is still behoves us as psychologists to examine seen to be generalisable or universal, and some of the implications of framing such therefore applicable to all people. The upshot of resolutions in liberal terms, and to explore how a liberal understanding of oppression is the resolutions by the APS could be otherwise suggestion that those who are marginalised framed. need to be included or provided space within

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In the following two extracts from the APA an approach thus does very little to encourage a resolution on same-sex marriage, we can see critical examination of heterosexuality and how the framework of liberalism implicitly heterosexual privilege (Kitzinger & Wilkinson, positions ‘equality with’ as the primary 1993). Whilst the APA resolution promotes the motivation for social justice: liberal notion of ‘equality with’, it fails to clearly spell out and examine who same-sex attracted That the APA believes that it is unfair and individuals would actually gain equality with. discriminatory to deny same-sex couples legal Though it is obvious that the resolution is access to civil marriage and to all its attendant positing that a marginalised group (same-sex benefits, rights, and privileges attracted individuals) should have equal rights

with a dominant group (heterosexual That APA shall take a leadership role in opposing all discrimination in legal benefits, rights, and individuals), the lack of recognition of these privileges against same-sex couples. particular terms (marginalised vs dominant) may be seen as doing very little to challenge how These two examples, whilst obviously marginalisation or dominance actually occurs demonstrating the APA’s commitment to social (Sedgwick, 2005). justice, continue to promote a particular vision of justice, wherein the rights of the heterosexual This point about the terms of reference majority continue to go unmarked as such (there employed within the resolution holds important is no mention in either of these extracts that implications for the efficacy of activism on the existing legislation discriminates in favour of part of the APA. In other words, whilst for those heterosexual couples). Access to civil marriage is to whom the resolution was directed, any form thus seen as something that must be granted to of critique of heterosexual privilege may been same-sex couples as it would be ‘unfair and considered to be too confrontational, there still discriminatory’ not to do so. As a result, the exists a need to raise awareness of how existing framing of same-sex attracted people’s laws are shaped around heterosexual norms; entitlement to rights in this way reinforces the norms that automatically exclude same-sex liberal framework of ‘equality with’ by failing to attracted individuals. Using words such as present any challenge to (or even mention of) ‘dominance’ or referring to a ‘heterosexual norm’ the heterosexual majority. This failure to may be one way of encouraging people to think challenge the normative status of about how marginalisation occurs within a heterosexuality is also evident in the statement relationship to dominance (Riggs & Choi, 2006). that: In regards to the use of particular terms, the The APA shall provide scientific and educational liberal framework of the APA resolution thus resources that inform public discussion and results in an understanding of discrimination that public policy development regarding sexual prioritises individual oppression. Such an orientation and marriage approach understands oppression as something that either ‘naturally happens’, or as something The suggestion that the APA will provide that must be addressed at an individual, rather resources on ‘sexual orientation and marriage’ than institutional, level (Clarke, 2003). For (which is the title of the document itself) example, the resolution states that: implicitly perpetuates an understanding of sexual orientation as referring solely to same- Discrimination and prejudice based on sexual sex attraction. This is due to the fact that the orientation detrimentally affects psychological, document itself does not explicitly examine physical, social, and economic well-being. sexual orientation and marriage other than in relation to same-sex marriage. Thus, whilst the Whilst there is no doubt that all of these normative status of heterosexuality, and indeed outcomes are true, this particular construction of heterosexual rights themselves, are the flipside discrimination does not challenge the corollary of of the coin implicitly presented within the APA such discrimination: that it gives rise to (or resolution on same-sex marriage, the failure to indeed makes possible) the privileges that explicitly refer to heterosexuality as a sexual heterosexually identified individuals experience. orientation maintains the primary relationship Discrimination is thus seen as impacting upon between the category of ‘sexual orientation’ and individual factors such as those relating to the same-sex attraction (Riggs & Choi, 2006). Such ‘psychological, physical, social and economic’. 187

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What is not represented is the fact that additive model, whereby individual people are heteronormativity results in many heterosexual presumed to experience discrimination based on individuals experiencing privilege in relation to sexuality plus discrimination based on race plus these factors, nor does it depict institutions discrimination based on age, etcetera. This (such as psychology) as structured upon the understanding of identity promotes a form of normative assumption of heterosexuality. In essentialism that fails to understand how these other words, discrimination remains the problem ‘axes’ are interrelated, and correspondingly, how of the individual experiencing discrimination, they may intersect in granting privilege. This rather than being seen as something that approach is common to what has been termed continues to shape social relations nation-wide ‘identity politics’, where rights movements are (Clarke, 2000). organised around a singular aspect of identity (e.g., lesbian/gay rights). Whilst such The notion of ‘equality with’, as I have discussed approaches to activism have achieved a great in this section, promotes the idea that the deal over recent decades, they may ultimately gaining of equality will automatically translate fall short of examining how systemic oppression into improved circumstances for same-sex operates, and may do little to explore alternate attracted individuals. Whilst this may well be the ways of claiming rights or identities. In this case for some such individuals, we cannot regard, Harris (1995) proposes that: automatically assume that an approach to activism that merely incorporates marginalised The result of essentialism is to reduce the lives of individuals (rather than actually addressing how people who experience multiple forms of oppression operates in regards to the current oppression to addition problems: ‘racism + status quo) will do anything to radically improve sexism = straight black women’s experience’, or ‘racism + sexism + homophobia = black lesbian the ways in which same-sex attracted people are experience’. Thus, in an essentialist world, black represented or treated (Phelan, 2001). As I will women’s experiences will always be forcibly discuss in the next section, the APA resolution fragmented before being subjected to analysis, on same-sex marriage also draws upon a liberal as those who are ‘only interested in race’ and framework where it utilises the notion of identity those who are ‘only interested in gender’ take politics. their separate slices of our lives (p. 255).

Identity Politics and Law Reform Barnard (2003) provides an excellent elaboration of Harris’ point about understanding identities as The aforementioned focus on ‘psychological simultaneous sites of difference, rather than as effects’ in relation to the denial of marriage to mere ‘problems of addition’, where he suggests same-sex attracted individuals demonstrates the that: type of political activism that appears to inform the resolution. Whilst I would again here In the United States… many contemporary reiterate the limitations that were placed upon political and theoretical formulations of communitarian subjectivity assume that every the APA in developing the resolution as a identity is merely the accretion of so many other response to a congressional hearing, I still base identities (thus, in popular liberal parlance, believe it is important to look at what it means a Chicana lesbian is said to be triply oppressed as to frame the resolution on such terms. One a women, a Chicana, and a lesbian), a paradigm implication is that the identities of same-sex that denies the specificity of identity and the attracted individuals are depicted as focused inseparability of the supposed constituents of a solely around sexuality, rather than as shaped particular identity (Chicana lesbian might be an through a range of identity positions. This leads identity in itself, rather than a conglomeration of to statements within the resolution such as: other identities). Consequently, this paradigm normalizes the modes of subjectivity privileged

by material power relations in a particular People who also experience discrimination based cultural-historical moment (to compute Chicana on age, race, ethnicity, disability, gender and lesbian as the sum of Chicana, women, and gender identity, religion, and socioeconomic lesbian, it to establish heterosexual male status may especially benefit from access to Chicanoness, white heterosexual femaleness, and marriage for same-sex couples. white male gayness as the central identities from which the Chicana lesbian draws her constituent The particular understanding of identity parts) and thus erases the experience of those promoted in this statement presumes an 188

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who occupy more than one of the canonized In both this section and the previous one, I have subject positions (p. 3). briefly outlined some of the ways in which a reliance upon a liberal framework within the APA This quote from Barnard highlights how a resolution on same-sex marriage fails to compartmentalised understanding of identity adequately address 1) heterosexual privilege (particularly as interpreted within a framework and the normative status of heterosexuality, 2) of identity politics) can in effect result in the the intersections of multiple identifications that perpetuation of particular forms of shape how we are positioned within society, and marginalisation. In this respect the APA 3) the systemic, institutional nature of racism resolution on same-sex marriage fails to explore and (hetero)sexism, and the implications of multiple concurrent points of identification when these for changes to the law. In the following it represents race, age, gender, etcetera, as section I will further elaborate how issues of isolated from one another. Not only does this privilege and oppression inform debates over fragment the experiences of particular same-sex same-sex marriage. attracted individuals (as Harris, 1995, suggests), but it also fails to adequately explore how some Privilege, Oppression and the Same- same-sex attracted individuals (namely those of Sex Marriage Debate us who identify as white and middle-class) may experience considerable privilege at the same In an early paper on the same-sex marriage time as we experience oppression (Riggs, 2006). debate, Ettelbrick (1989) suggested that whilst These would of course be difficult points to for many same-sex attracted people access to address in a resolution aimed at a generalist marriage may represent a significant gain in audience, and for inclusion in congressional regards to rights, there is little possibility that hearings. However, I do believe that a shift in gaining such access will actually change the focus away from ‘equality with’, and towards an institution of marriage in any significant way. It understanding of the structural disadvantage is most likely that heterosexual marriage will that currently shapes the lives of same-sex continue to be held up as the gold standard attracted individuals, could have directed the against which all relationships are measured, the target audience’s focus towards these key issues outcome being that certain individuals and without alienating them. relationships will still be denied state sanction (for example, those in polyamorous Finally, the APA resolution does not take heed of relationships; see Barker, 2004). The problem a wide range of literature that suggests that that arises, then, from an approach to activism concerns about same-sex marriage may actually that accepts the terms for belonging as defined not be of central importance to same-sex in relation to particular norms (especially those attracted people who experience on a daily basis surrounding liberal individualism), is that the oppression that arises from racism or lesbians and gay men (and in particular, white, classism (Ahmed, 2004; Weston, 1991). As I will middle-class lesbians and gay men) are discuss later in the paper, the push for same-sex encouraged to accept the incursion of the state marriage rights is often the province of white, upon our lives. Furthermore, those of us who middle-class lesbians and gay men, a factor that identify as white, middle-class lesbians or gay requires considerable attention in relation to its men may well earn rights to marriage that implications for activism (Bernstein, 2001; Riggs, potentially come at the expense of groups of 2005). What I will signal here, however, is that it people who are differentially disenfranchised is important to think about what we are trying to from state sanction. gain by seeking state sanction in the form of marriage rights. Whilst many advocacy groups For example, and as I alluded to in the previous have drawn attention to the considerable gains section, the push for same-sex marriage rights is that may result from accessing marriage rights, more often than not an issue that is of primary it may also be the case that there are other concern to white lesbians and gay men (see also ways of achieving such gains. Indeed, for many Bernstein, 2001; Ettelbrick, 1998; Riggs, 2006). same-sex attracted individuals, using state Whilst marriage rights may also be of concern to sanction of our relationships as a means to lesbians and gay men who do not identify as gaining rights may be quite antithetical to our white, other intersecting concerns about state own politics or family forms (Riggs, 2006; racism and its connection to the sanction of Weston, 1991). 189

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particular bodies may mediate how institutions exclusion of certain same-sex attracted such as marriage are understood (Weston, individuals from rights. The framework of 1991). In other words, for those of us who are liberalism (seeking as it does ‘equality for all’) white, our race privilege may afford us the thus does not necessarily lend itself to actually luxury of focusing primarily on our sexual understanding or valuing the specificities of identities and our rights in regards to sexuality: individual people’s experiences: it is instead our race privilege allows us this space. reduces a broad range of experiences down to a particular dominant narrative of experience. As a This point about privilege demonstrates how the result, only certain groups of people are category ‘lesbian and gay’ may itself be seen as recognised as entitled to rights and privileges; exclusionary. In her work on the cultural politics privileges that may come at the expense of of emotion, Ahmed (2004, p. 148) utilises the others (Phelan, 2001). metaphor of “sinking into a comfortable chair” to illustrate how the normative status of These issues of privilege and recognition draw heterosexuality operates. She suggests that attention again to the problems that often inhere cultural spaces are shaped around to single-axis identity politics. As I have outlined heterosexuality, so that, for example, we see elsewhere (Riggs, 2005; 2006; Riggs & Riggs, billboards featuring heterosexual couples; we 2004), engaging in forms of activism that see heterosexual couples walking down the privilege any singular form of oppression (e.g., street together holding hands, and we hear sexuality) may well fail to adequately explore music and see movies that depict heterosexual how ongoing histories of oppression shape the lives. This results in public spaces being ways we conceptualise rights. For example, ‘comfortable’ for heterosexual individuals. lesbian and gay rights activism has often failed to engage with sexuality on any terms other However, it is important to note that public than the homo-hetero binary. 1 One example of spaces continue to be ‘heterosexualised’: lesbian this is in relation to the rights claims of and gay rights campaigns have promoted individuals who identify as transgendered, and visibility and awareness, the result being that the overlaps and disjunctures with lesbian and certain public spaces are ‘queered’ – they are gay rights claims. Coombs (2001) suggests that reshaped to represent the experiences and the conflation of ‘same-sex attraction’ with the values of (particular) lesbians and gay men (for category ‘gay’ (for example) can effectively example, think of the large gay communities in exclude the experiences of individuals who San Francisco, Pride events and marches that identify as transgendered (see also Hegarty & ‘reclaim the streets’, alongside representations Chase, 2005, in regards to intersex activism). of lesbian and gay identities in television The challenge that transgenderism presents to programmes). Yet, whilst such reshapings the law (in regards to post-operative legal continue to create a public space for (some) identification and its relationship to marriage) lesbians and gay men, they may also unsettles the homo-hetero binary in ways that unintentionally perpetuate the exclusion of other lesbian or gay marriage may not. Thus the push groups of people who are not accorded space for same-sex marriage rights, primarily by white (e.g., transgender or intersex individuals, those lesbians and gay men, must necessarily engage who identify as bisexual or polyamorous etc.). with these disparities, and the challenges that Certain ‘queer identities’ thus gain privileges that they present to identity politics. These may well come at the expense of others, or intersections of privilege and oppression, and which may curtail the rights claims of other their implications for lesbian and gay activism, groups of people (Riggs, 2006). This point about thus warrant further attention. Exploring the privilege holds particular implications for the conjunctions of race, gender, sexuality and class brief analysis of the APA resolution on same-sex may be one strategy for examining how privilege marriage that I provided above. The resolution, often operates at the expense of oppression, whilst informed by a particular legal and political context, is nonetheless potentially a tool for 1 Of course this is not to ignore work in the area of oppression as well as liberation. In other words, queer theory, which takes as its starting place the whilst such resolutions may hold the potential need to challenge this binary. However, it is also for assisting same-sex attracted individuals in important to recognise that queer theory or activism securing rights, they may also ensure the is often quite different from, or separate to, lesbian/gay law reform. 190

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and what this might mean for same-sex may ultimately serve to further enshrine the attracted individuals who desire state sanction. existing forms of kinship that are available (and In the final section of the paper I elaborate an recognised) under heteropatriarchy, rather than alternate approach to how activism may look. creating a space for new ways of understanding ourselves and our relationships with other Resisting Domestication people (see also Weston, 1991).

Butler’s (2002) work on legal sanction, alongside In contrast to equal rights approaches to Fox’s (1985, 1993) on anarchism, psychology marriage, which accept the framework of and the law, are incisive for understanding how liberalism, we may instead focus our attention debates over same-sex marriage may work to on reconfiguring how activism may constitute a ‘domesticate’ same-sex attracted people. Robson critique of the very notion of state sanction (1992) uses the term ‘domesticate’ to describe itself. In his work on marriage and civil rights, how the experiences of lesbians are made to Halle (2001) proposes that the work of the 2 appear as if they are ‘just like’ the experiences Cambridge Lavender Alliance (CLA) may be of heterosexual women. She suggests that instructive for understanding how state sanction domestication can occur when same-sex may be reconfigured in terms that are more attracted people accept the terms for belonging conducive to prioritising alternate kinship forms. offered to us by the state. These terms for Halle suggests that the concept of ‘state moral belonging often involve a) accepting minimalism’ may be a useful way of both heterosexual norms, b) marginalising the specific exposing the biases that are inherent to the law or unique experiences that same-sex attracted (and, I would suggest, to psychology), and for individuals may have, and thus c) being willing negotiating forms of state-based support that do to accept ‘equality with’, rather than pushing for not require the current high level of state control fundamental system change. In her work on over family forms. Thus he reports that the CLA same-sex marriage, Butler (2002) suggests that: resolution on marriage “made no mention of marriage at all; rather, it… required of the state The petition for marriage rights seeks to solicit that it withdraw from the regulation of marriage, state recognition for nonheterosexual unions, and thereby allowing for a de facto expansion of the so configures the state as withholding an parameters of civil society” (p. 388). Such an entitlement that it really should distribute in a approach draws attention to the moral nondiscriminatory way, regardless of sexual judgements that inhere to the law, whilst also orientation. That the state’s offer might result in suggesting that morality should not be the intensification of normalization is not widely something that is arbitrated by the state. recognized as a problem within the mainstream lesbian and gay movement (p. 16). Such an approach to activism may assist same- Whilst acknowledging the value that access to sex attracted individuals in refusing the terms marriage may hold for some people, Butler is set by the state for debates over same-sex critical of the risk for ‘normalisation’ (or marriage. Likewise, to some degree the notion ‘domestication’, as Robson would label it), of state moral minimalism may sidestep the particularly as it may do little to actually problems that arise from further promoting a destabilise the institution of marriage as one of particular form of marriage-based relationality the foundations of heteronormativity (see also that will potentially exclude many people and Ettelbrick, 1989). Similarly, Fox (1993) suggests relationships. To return to the APA resolution, that: then, I would propose that such a resolution need not take a position that involves accepting A radical critique of psychology's links to the the terms for recognition set by the state. status quo, departing from the assumption that law is inherently advantageous, directs our 2 attention to how the law hinders fundamental The Cambridge Lavender Alliance (CLA) is the key social change even as it allows more modest queer political organisation in Cambridge, liberal reform (p. 237). Massachusetts. It has a long history of queer activism, and has recently endorsed candidates for election within the US. The CLA has often been particularly Together these two interpretations of state forward thinking in its approach to queer politics, as sanction under the law demonstrate how a was highlighted in its early position on the push for desire for sanction on the terms set by the state marriage rights. 191

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Instead, the APA could develop resolutions that time, nor the naïve luxury of those who benefit start by highlighting the role that both from privilege. Instead, as per Freire’s (1972; psychology and the state have played in 1973) seminal work on social activism, we may oppressing same-sex attracted individuals. This understand such analyses as central to would allow not only for some reflection on why challenging the heteronormative assumptions law reform is needed (i.e., not to gain ‘equality surrounding rights that often lead people to with’, but because the law is founded upon petition for rights in ways that may at times do heterosexual norms that are discriminatory), but more harm than good. would also provide a space within which multiple forms of oppression could be examined in the Conclusions context of marriage and family law. Such a resolution could, for example, highlight how Throughout this paper I have drawn attention to notions of miscegenation have historically some of the complex ways in which experiences informed marriage laws, and the implications of of privilege intersect with experiences of this for how the law is racialised (Moreton- oppression, and how a desire for state sanction Robinson, 2004). By starting from a focus on on the terms of liberal individualism can render how social norms are produced, and how they some same-sex attracted individuals complicit exclude or oppress certain groups of people, it with particular social norms. My brief may be possible to develop a position on same- examination of the American Psychological sex marriage that need not reinforce liberal Association’s resolution on same-sex marriage notions of ‘equality with’. highlights some of the ways in which notions of ‘equality with’, and their relation to identity Likewise, a focus on the multiple effects of the politics, may do very little to shift the power law upon the lives of those who experience bases of white heterosexual dominance. Whilst I oppression may enable white, middle-class have acknowledged the limitations that existed lesbians and gay men (amongst others) to for those who developed the APA resolution, I explore not only how we experience oppression, have also suggested some alternate approaches but also how we stand to benefit from racialised for formulating such resolutions. The concept of norms. A resolution framed in this way may ‘state moral minimalism’ may be one way of focus on how rights are often founded upon the exploring a more limited role for the state in our exclusion of certain groups, an approach that lives – a role that rather than representing a would encourage critical examination of how diminishing of social support, may instead complicity or domestication operate (Riggs, engender supportive communities based on the 2006). By understanding rights in a relational valuing of difference, rather than the further (rather than individual) way, it may be easier to marginalisation of those who differ from the conceptualise how privilege is made possible white, middle-class, heterosexual norm. through oppression, and how rights claims represent not the a priori entitlements of The potential for activism within the discipline of individuals, but are rather framed by our psychology is significant, but in my opinion must belonging to particular marginalised or dominant be informed by a critique of the status quo from groups (Moane, 2003). Finally, a focus on state its very foundatio ns, rather than simply moral minimalism may be useful for challenging attempting to amend specific laws or advocating not only how we see the rights of same-sex for inclusion. Whilst this will be no easy task, attracted individuals, but how we understand and whilst it is no doubt the case that liberal the rights of all people: state mandated rights individualism holds considerable sway within are imposed not only upon same-sex attracted psychology, there does nonetheless exist great people, but upon all citizens. Rather than potential within the discipline for system change, focusing on how we can engage with the state and for radical challenges to be made to how we in order to gain sanction, we may instead focus understand ourselves and our relations to on the limitations of state sanction (as it is others. Rather than working on the terms set by currently configured) for all people. This may the state, I would suggest that it is important help to challenge the stranglehold that liberal that the discipline of psychology starts from the politics hold over how we understand rights. terms set by those who experience oppression. Engaging in analyses of state-based oppression Whilst it is of course important that dominant thus need not be considered either a waste of group members challenge their/our privilege, it

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is also important that significant space is Bernstein, M. (2001). Gender, queer family accorded to examining the biases that inhere to policies, and the limits of the law. In M. the discipline itself. Bernstein & R. Reimann (Eds.) Queer families, queer politics: Challenging culture and the To return to Bradley and Selby’s (2001) points state . New York: Columbia University Press. about the aims of the discipline, then, it may be timely to remember that social change is both Bradley, B.S. & Selby, J.M. (2001). To criticise always possible, yet always under threat as a the critic: Songs of experience. Australian result of cooption or domestication. Examining Psychologist, 36 , 84-87. psychology’s role in both challenging and perpetuating oppression is an important Burman, E. (1998). Deconstructing feminist opportunity for activism within the discipline, psychology . London: Sage. and one that may give rise to far more wide- reaching changes than simply gaining ‘equality Butler, J. (2002). Is kinship always already with’. heterosexual? Differences: A Feminist Journal of Cultural Studies, 13 , 14-44. Acknowledgements Clarke, V. (2000). ‘Stereotype, attack and I begin by acknowledging the sovereignty of the stigmatize those who disagree’: Employing Kaurna people, the First Nations people upon scientific rhetoric in debates about lesbian and whose land I live in Adelaide, South Australia. I gay parenting. Feminism & Psychology, 10 , would like to thank Judith Glassgold and an 152-159. anonymous reviewer for very useful comments on an earlier version of this paper, and thanks to Clarke, V. (2003). Lesbian and gay marriage: Greg for support, critical commentary and proof Transformation or normalization? Feminism & reading. Psychology, 13 , 519-529.

Author Note Coombs, M. (2001). Transgenderism and sexual orientation: More than a marriage of Damien Riggs is the Editor of the Gay and convenience? In M. Bernstein & R. Reimann Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review. He has (Eds.) Queer families, queer politics: published two books on queer issue: Priscilla, Challenging culture and the state . New York: (white) queen of the desert (Peter Lang, 2006), Columbia University Press. and Becoming parent: Lesbians, gay men, and family (Post Pressed, 2007). He is currently Ettelbrick, P.L. (1989). Since when is marriage a working on a textbook on LGBTQ psychologies path to liberation? Out/Look: National Gay and for Cambridge University Press with Victoria Lesbian Quarterly, 9 , 14-16. Clarke, Elizabeth Peel and Sonja Ellis. Fox, D. (1985). Psychology, ideology, utopia, References and the Commons. American Psychologist, 40 , 48-58. Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Fox, D. (1993). Psychological jurisprudence and Press. radical social change. American Psychologist, 48 , 234-241. American Psychological Association. (2004). Resolution on sexual orientation and marriage . Fox, D. & Prilleltensky, I. (1997). Critical Retrieved June 2, 2005, from psychology: An introduction . London: Sage. http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbc/policy/marriage.pdf Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed . Barker, M. (2004). This is my partner, and this is New York: Penguin Books. my… partner’s partner: Constructing a polyamorous identity in a monogamous world. Friere, P. (1973). Education for critical International Journal of Constructivist consciousness . New York: Seabury Press. Psychology, 18 , 75-88. 193

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Hage, G. (1998). White nation: Fantasies of Riggs, D.W. (2004). Challenging the white supremacy in a multicultural nation. monoculturalism of psychology: Towards a Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press. more socially accountable pedagogy and practice. Australian Psychologist, 39, 110-126. Halle, R. (2001). Political organizing and the limits of civil rights: Gay marriage and queer Riggs, D.W. (2005). Psychology and same-sex families. In M. Bernstein & R. Reimann (Eds.) attraction: 30 years on. Gay and Lesbian Queer families, queer politics: Challenging Issues and Psychology Review, 1 , 1-4. culture and the state . New York: Columbia Riggs, D.W. (2006). Priscilla, (white) queen of University Press. the desert: queer rights/race privilege. New York: Peter Lang. Harris, A.P. (1995). Race and essentialism in feminist legal theory. In R. Delago (Ed.) Riggs, D.W. & Choi, P.Y.L. (2006). Critical race theory: The cutting edge . Heterosexism, racism and psychology: Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Challenging or colluding with privilege? The Psychologist, 19, 288-291. Hegarty, P. & Chase, C. (2005). Intersex activism, feminism and psychology. In I. Riggs, D.W. & Riggs, L.D. (2004). Talking about Morland & A. Willox (Eds.) Queer theory . heterosexism: Politics, complicity and Hampshire: Palgrave. identification. In D.W. Riggs & G. Walker (Eds.) Out in the antipodes: Australian and Johnson, C. (2003). Heteronormative citizenship: New Zealand perspectives on gay and lesbian The Howard government’s views on gay and issues in psychology . Bentley, Western lesbian issues. Australian Journal of Political Australia: Brightfire Press. Science, 38 , 45-62. Robson, R. (1992). Mother: The legal Kitzinger, C. & Perkins, R. (1993). Changing our domestication of lesbian existence. Hypatia, 7 : minds: Lesbian feminism and 172-185. psychology . New York: New York University Press. Sedgwick, E. (2005). Axiomatic. In I. Morland & A. Willox (Eds.) Queer theory (pp. 81-95). Kitzinger, C. & Wilkinson, C. (1993). Theorizing Hampshire: Palgrave. heterosexuality. In S. Wilkinson & C. Kitzinger (Eds.) Heterosexuality: A feminism and Terry, J. (1999). An American obsession: psychology reader (pp. 1-32). London: Sage. Science, medicine and homosexuality in modern society . Chicago: University of Moane, G. (2003). Bridging the personal and the Chicago Press. political: Practices for a liberation psychology. American Journal of Community Psychology, Watts, R.J. & Serrano-GarcÍa, I. (2003). The 31 , 91-101. quest for a liberating community psychology: An overview. American Journal of Community Moreton-Robinson, A. (2004). The possessive Psychology, 31 , 73-78. logic of patriarchal white sovereignty: The High Court and the Yorta Yorta decision. Weston, K. (1991). Families we choose: Borderlands e-journal, 3 . Retrieved May 30, Lesbians, gays, kinship . New York: Columbia 2005, from University Press. http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu. au/vol3no2_2004/moreton_possessive.htm Wilkinson, S. & Kitzinger, C. (2005). Same-sex marriage and equality. The Psychologist, 18 , Phelan, S. (2001). Sexual strangers: Gays, 290-293. lesbians, and dilemmas of citizenship . Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wright, S. (2001). International human rights, decolonisation and globalisation: Becoming human . New York: Routledge.

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Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2007

COMMENT ON DUFFY (2007)

SOPHIE POINTER

The article by Duffey (2007) provides a order for the child of two men and in the comprehensive review of Australian adoption remarks he stated “I am satisfied it is in Mark’s and family law as it relates to the needs of best interests for significant decisions relating to same-sex parents. However, I believe the author his welfare (for example, those relating to has underplayed the advances in the recognition health, education and religion) to be made by of ‘homo-nuclear’ families by the Family Court in both of the people who treat him as their son, the last 5 years. The author suggests that the and that he can only benefit from their informed Family Court views a same-sex attracted parent involvement in all aspects of his life” (Re Mark: “as a risk to a child” (p. 91). Perhaps in the early an application relating to parental responsibilities 90’s, and before, this was the prevailing view. (2003) FamCA 822 at 101). However, recent judgements by the Family There is no doubt that Family Court justices and Court, although few and far between, suggest Registrars are subject to their own prejudices, otherwise. In a recent decision (R & J and Anor and while they endeavour to provide fearless (2006) FamCA 1398) Justice Guest again and frank judgements of the cases before them stressed the validity of the homo-nuclear family. based on the laws available, the degree of In his judgement Justice Guest referred latitude in the interpretation of those laws will extensively to the findings of Re Patrick and always be subject to their own belief systems. In went on to say “The family in this case, in recent years the Family Court has signalled a addition to A is comprised of the mother and the change from past homophobic views. While it is co-parent whose relationship, now tested with unfortunate for any family to find themselves in time, sits seamlessly with what I had to say in a position of having to engage with the Family Re Patrick ” (R & J and Anor (2006) FamCA 1398 Court, same-sex families have a small number of at 14). strong supporting judgements recognising and celebrating the strength of the homo-nuclear While Justice Guest appears to be a lone voice in family on which to base their case. the wilderness I contend that this has more to do with the extremely low number of same-sex Author Note family cases coming before the courts than an example of a single dissenting voice. Other Dr Sophie Pointer BSc (Hons) PhD (Psychology). recent cases before the Family Court have Assistant Director, Research Centre for Injury upheld the notion that a homo-nuclear family Studies, Flinders University, Mark Oliphant can be in the best interests of a child. For Building, Laffer Drive, Bedford Park SA. Email: example in Re Mark (Re Mark: an application [email protected] relating to parental responsibilities (2003) FamCA 822) Justice Brown granted a parenting

Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2007

BOOK REVIEW

REVIEWED BY SUE KENTLYN

Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, about difference that could serve as grounds for Intersectional and Queer Perspectives. Edited healing and the development of new alliances. by Angela Pattatucci Aragón. Binghamton, NY: The scope and analytic depth of these essays Harrington Park Press, 2006, 270pp., ISBN: 1- from an impressive range of scholars, 56023-645-0. researchers, students, activists, and service providers, with diverse perspectives including The Sydney Morning Herald last week reported a public health, science and technology, cultural case before the South Australian Equal studies, sociology, women’s, sexuality, and Opportunity Tribunal, in which Tracie O’Keefe, a critical whiteness studies, social work, English, transgender psychotherapist, lodged a complaint political science, and even the wonderfully- against a lesbian support group called ‘Sappho’s named ‘social corporeality’, make an insightful Party’. She wanted to attend an event in the and valuable contribution to her project. Adelaide Hills in 2006, but the group has a policy of excluding transgender people because it only The basic premise on which the book is built is supports lesbians who were raised as females that both ‘lesbianism’ and ‘feminism’ depend for from birth. Ms O’Keefe, the paper says, wants their legibility and viability on the stable and an apology. She started living as a woman 35 discrete concept ‘woman’ as a fundamental years ago, at the age of 15, and has had gender identity. This concept is problematised, reassignment surgery. “I’ve lived in a lesbian challenged, and disrupted, both ontologically relationship for 14 years with the same woman”, and experientially, by Intersexed and Trans Ms O’Keefe said. “I don’t get discriminated people, and it is this perceived lack of against in any other part of the gay community” congruence that underlies the rejection, (Price 2007). exclusion, and harassment many such people experience in their efforts to integrate into ‘the The relationship of the T, T and Is 1 with the lesbian community’. The different essays then GLBs 2 has always been complex and contested. analyse these themes from a number of The conflation of gender with sexuality issues standpoints. All are engaging and thought- strikes some as neither logical nor politically provoking; a few stood out for me. Coogan expedient. This often rocky relationship has looks at the ‘specificities in the flesh’ and their been especially fraught amongst some lesbian role in identity, and the border wars involved in groups, especially those with a radical feminist policing the boundaries of community in light of philosophy. Female to Male trans people (F2M) this. VanNewkirk interrogates the concept of have sometimes been portrayed as traitors to the ‘authentic lesbian’ by examining the their (female) gender, and Male to Female trans metanarratives within gay and lesbian folks (M2F) have been viewed with suspicion, community, and the poststructuralist challenge and even outright hostility, as men ‘colonising’ to constricting labels and stable identities. women’s bodies. This attitude was most Robinson’s meditation on the role of quantifiable dramatically expressed in Raymond’s notorious identities in the construction of community is statement that “All transsexuals rape women’s very nuanced, and he attempts to construct a bodies” (1979), and is perhaps best represented new model on the understanding that even the in Australia by the work of Sheila Jeffreys. corporeality of the body is dynamic, and all identities are a kind of dynamic social discourse. This collection of papers arose out of editor In saying that “no two womyn-born womyn can Aragón’s personal experience of coming out as have the same life experience”, he an intersex person to her lesbian community, problematises the idea of community as based and the silencing, marginalisation, and hostility on fundamental commonalities and she experienced. Her agenda, however, is not acknowledges that increasing human diversity simply to denounce and criticise the lesbian demands new sets of discourses. community, but rather to enter into a dialogue The politics of naming is much in evidence. I 1 Transgender, Transsexual and Intersex was struck both by how each writer felt the 2 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual need to define what they mean by terms like

KENTLYN: BOOK REVIEW

‘transgender’, ‘transsexual’, ‘FTM’ etc., and the suburban; political/apolitical; separatist/ considerable variations in those definitions. This inclusionist; christian/pagan/atheist/secular; the illustrates the problem that the idea of identity fault lines are beyond enumeration. Even the as fluid and negotiated poses for language, taken-for-granted quality of the inherent conflict which may inhere in the nature of language between lesbian feminism and trans is itself. The process of naming seems to foreclose problematic. We’ve all heard the stories such as on continuing change; it reifies or fixes whatever the one I opened with. However, interviewing is named. I use the term ‘politics’ advisedly; thirteen Australian MTF trans lesbians, McDonald what challenges me personally the most, as a found that most of them were welcomed into feminist who became a lesbian as a direct result lesbian communities but were grappling with of a feminist critique of sex and gender politics, feelings of not belonging to, or alienation from, is the conflicted and equivocal place I find local trans communities. Also noticeably absent myself in as a result of the very debates this were the voices of ‘feminist lesbians’ who could book elucidates. Feminism taught me to explain their opposition to trans inclusivity. As examine myself for evidence of ‘false Stuart remarks about the movie Better Than consciousness’ – as VanNewkirk says, Chocolate , “there are no characters who voice “Ultimately, everything I do . . . is influenced by affection and support for Judy [the M2F a feminist praxis that seeks to unveil and name character], but would prefer she not participate power structures in order to resist them” (p.82). in particular events” (p. 225). While claiming I am grateful that being a lesbian brought me to that “homonormativity acts to fragment lesbian love my own body through loving the bodies of communities into hierarchies of worthiness” (p. other women. Nevertheless, some of these 9), Aragón and others have placed lesbians who essays challenged me to look honestly at my belong to groups like ‘Sappho’s Party’ at the continuing discomfort with my body and my bottom of the ‘hierarchy of worthiness’ without identity as a ‘woman’, and my desire to move allowing them to plead their cause. beyond gender altogether; all of this feels like a betrayal of the very codes that ‘liberated’ me. That criticism aside, I found the essays in this The question for me remains, does wanting to volume informative, respectful, and nuanced; change some aspects of your female both intellectually exciting and personally embodiment necessarily mean a derogation or challenging. Anyone with an interest in gender devaluation of your ‘womyn-ness’? The desire and sexuality, and their role in creating, that your gender not be readily legible to others, sustaining, and contesting ‘community’ will find the hope of avoiding being stuck in their this book a rich feast. I teach the sociology of stereotypes and accompanying prejudices and gender and sexuality to first year University preconceptions – are these a betrayal of students, and often find myself distressed by feminism, a subversion of lesbianism? their general level of ignorance and prejudice, but also very heartened by my students’ My only real difficulty with many of the essays interest, acceptance and sensitivity. This was their apparent assumptions of coherence, collection reminds me of my own ignorance and the failure to engage with the existing prejudices, and challenges me to new levels of multiplicities and inconsistencies within identities awareness, understanding and engagement, and communities. I kept encountering generic with my own genders and sexualities, as well as terms like, ‘lesbian identity’, ‘lesbian space’, those of others. I can offer no higher praise. ‘lesbian feminism’, and ‘the lesbian community’, ‘the transgender community’, ‘the GLBTQ Author Note community’, and even, ‘the feminist movement’! (I believe a more accurate term could be, ‘the Sue Kentlyn is doing study and research in feminist mêlée’!). Even the title, “Challenging Sociology at UQ, with interests in Queer Theory, Lesbian Norms” suggests that there are lesbian and Queer Families. Formerly a pastor’s wife norms – I’d like to ask - Which lesbians? Whose and missionary, Sue commenced tertiary study norms? Lesbians who are womyn-born womyn, in 1996 and ‘came out’ in 1999. She has worked even, or perhaps especially feminist ones, can in various capacities in Brisbane’s GLBTIQ experience similar problems in establishing their community, including telephone counselling and legitimacy, of exclusion, marginalisation, and facilitating a lesbian support group. School of prejudice, as transwomen. Essentialist/ Social Science, The University of Queensland, St constructionist; kids/no kids; butch- Lucia QLD 4071. Email: [email protected] femme/androgynous;monogamous/polyamorous ;vanilla/bdsm; 2 nd wave/3rd wave; urban/ 197

KENTLYN: BOOK REVIEW

References 4 November.

Price, S. (2007). Transsexual fights for her Raymond, J. (1979). Transsexual empire: The lesbian rights. The Sydney Morning Herald . making of the she-male . Boston: Beacon Press.

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CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS Special Issue of Health Sociology Review

Community, Family, Citizenship and the Health of LGBTIQ People

Guest Editors: Jane Edwards & Damien W. Riggs

Whilst lesbian women, gay men, and bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people are typically excluded from normative forms of social order, they nonetheless continue to create their own forms of order. These intersections of exclusion and inclusion often result in complex health issues for LGBTIQ communities, particularly in relation to matters concerning families and citizenship. This special issue invites theoretical and empirical papers from across disciplines and theoretical perspectives addressing the following broad topics:

• What influence do normative and/or re-negotiated understandings of community, family and citizenship have on the health of LGBTIQ people?

• How do communities, families and forms of citizenship influence access to health care services among LGBTIQ people?

• How are notions of community, family and citizenship deployed in health policy relevant to LGBTIQ health needs?

• How do new forms of order within LGBTIQ communities potentially affect health outcomes for marginalised members of such communities?

Manuscripts should be submitted via email to both editors no later than 28 th February, 2008 , and should be between 4000 and 6000 words in length. Enquires and/or manuscripts are encouraged from individuals marginalised by all forms of order, both normative and within LGBTIQ communities.

Authors are invited to contact the guest editors to discuss topics in advance of submission:

[email protected] [email protected]

Guidelines for preparation of manuscripts: www.healthsociologyreview.com/author-guidelines.php

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Special Issue Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review

Mental Health and LGBT Communities

Guest Editors: Lynne Hillier, Jane Edwards and Damien W. Riggs

One of the legacies of the well-known histories associated with the misuse of psychology within LGBT communities is a hesitancy in discussing the mental health of such communities. Such hesitancy is understandable not only in regards to the historical treatment of LGBT people by mental health professionals, but also in relation to ongoing attempts at pathologising same-sex attraction (e.g., in the instance of ‘reparative therapies’). Nonetheless, there continues to be a pressing need to examine how issues of mental health shape the lives of members of LGBT communities. This involves examining not only how the mental health professions can support LGBT people experiencing poor mental health, but also how LGBT and heterosexual people/practitioners/communities may celebrate individual LGBT people’s/ communities’ experiences of positive mental health.

We seek full-length empirical and theoretical papers (5000 words max) and shorter commentary pieces (2000 words max) that address the following (and related) themes and questions:

*Research on the supportive role that LGBT communities play in promoting positive mental health *Research on the ways in which communities may support individuals in accessing services to address poor mental health *Accounts of mental health outcomes amongst LGBT people marginalised within LGBT communities around issues of race, class, ethnicity and religion *Examples of successful community and individual interventions relating to LGBT people *Research exploring how social norms continue to detrimentally affect LGBT communities and people *Suggestions for ways to move forward in research on mental health and LGBT people *Means of promoting mental health practice with and by LGBT people *Clinical accounts of mental health practice as it is applied to and by LGBT people *Accounts of mental health/well being amongst Indigenous LGBT communities

The deadline for submissions (maximum 6000 words) is June 1 st 2008 for publication in August 2008. Informal enquires and submissions should be sent to:

Dr Damien W. Riggs Editor, GLIP Review [email protected]

Submission guidelines at: http://www.groups.psychology.org.au/glip/glip_review

Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review

Preparation, submission and publication guidelines

Types of articles that we typically consider:

A) • Empirical articles (5000 word max) • Research in brief: Reviews of a favourite or • Theoretical pieces troublesome article/book chapter that you have • Commentary on LGBTI issues and psychology read and would like to comment on

B) • Conference reports/conference abstracts • Book reviews (please contact the Editor for a • Practitioner’s reports/field notes list of books available & review guidelines) • Political/media style reports of relevant issues • Promotional material for LGBT relevant issues

The Review also welcomes proposals for special issues and guest Editors.

Each submission in section A should be prepared for blind peer-review if the author wishes. If not, submissions will still be reviewed, but the identity of the author may be known to the reviewer. Submissions for blind review should contain a title page that has all of the author(s) information, along with the title of the submission, a short author note (50 words or less), a word count and up to 5 key words. The remainder of the submission should not identify the author in any way, and should start on a new page with the submission title followed by an abstract and then the body of the text. Authors who do not require blind review should submit papers as per the above instructions, the difference being that the body text may start directly after the key words.

Each submission in section B should contain the author(s) information, title of submission (if relevant), a short author note (50 words or less) and a word count, but need not be prepared for blind review.

All submissions must adhere to the rules set out in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (fifth edition), and contributors are encouraged to contact the Editor should they have any concerns with this format as it relates to their submission. Spelling should be Australian (e.g., ‘ise’) rather than American (‘ize’), and submissions should be accompanied with a letter stating any conflicts of interest in regards to publication or competing interests. Footnotes should be kept to a minimum. References should be listed alphabetically by author at the end of the paper. For example:

Journal Articles : Riggs, D.W. (2004). The politics of scientific knowledge: Constructions of sexuality and ethics in the conversion therapy literature. Lesbian & Gay Psychology Review , 5, 16-24. Books : Kitzinger, C. (1987). The social construction of lesbianism. London: Sage. Edited Books : Coyle, A. & Kitzinger, C. (Eds.) (2002). Lesbian & gay psychology: New perspectives . Oxford: BPS Blackwell. Book Chapters : MacBride-Stewart, S. (2004). Dental dams: A parody of straight expectations in the promotion of ‘safer’ lesbian sex. In D.W. Riggs & G.A. Walker (Eds.), Out in the antipodes: Australian and New Zealand perspectives on gay and lesbian issue in psychology (pp.393-416). Perth: Brightfire Press.

References within the text should be listed in alphabetical order separated by a semi-colon, page numbers following year. For example:

(Clarke, 2001; Peel, 2001; Riggs & Walker, 2004) (Clarke, 2002a; b) (MacBride-Stewart, 2004, p. 398)

Authors should avoid the use of sexist, racist and heterosexist language. Authors should follow the guidelines for the use of non-sexist language provided by the American Psychological Society.

Papers should be submitted in Word format: title bold 14 points all caps left aligned, author 12 points all caps left aligned, abstract 10 points italics justified , article text 10 points justified, footnotes 9 points justified.

All submissions should be sent to the Editor, either via email (preferred): [email protected] , or via post: School of Psychology, The University of Adelaide, South Australia, 5005.

Deadlines

January 30 for April edition May 30 for August edition September 30 for December edition